 Louis Dantin van Rooten was born November 29, 1906 in Mexico City. At age eight he would immigrate with his parents to the United States moving to Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1927 and was a successful architect in Cleveland for several years. During that time he began participating in amateur productions at the Cleveland Playhouse. In the mid-1930s he decided to pursue acting full-time, initially in radio. Van Rooten was fluent in Spanish, Italian, and French. While serving in the armed forces during World War II he did special broadcasts for the military in those languages. His abilities led to film work, often roles requiring accents or playing villains like Heinrich Himmler in The Hitler Gang in 1944 and Operation Eichmann in 1961. Other notable appearances include Two Years Before the Mask 1946, Beyond Glory, The Big Clock, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes, all three of those in 1948, Champion in 1949, Detective Story in 1951, and The Sea Chase in 1955. He also portrayed the King and the Grand Duke in Disney's Cinderella in 1950. Van Rooten was also a very successful freelance radio actor, working on as many as fifty shows in a month. He said he rarely knew what role he was going to play until he arrived at the studio and recalled that once he was bumped off in ten different crime shows in a single week. Van Rooten regularly appeared in series like 2000 plus, Best Plays, Escape, I Love a Mystery, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Let George Do It, The Mysterious Traveler, Theatre 5, and X-1. He had reoccurring roles as the evil Rocksor in Shandu the Magician, Emilio in the soap opera Valiant Lady, and as the sidekick Denny in Bulldog Drummin. Highlighting his versatility as an actor, in an episode of Radio City Playhouse called Joey Was Different, he played all twelve characters in the show about a neurotic actor confronted by eleven of his characters he had played in the past. Van Rooten also appeared on Broadway, debuting as the French Inspector in The Dancer in 1946. He successfully transitioned from radio to television making appearances on Gunsmoke, Studio One, the Armstrong Circle Theatre, Omnibus, and Perry Mason, and as fight manager Naby Walsh in The Joe Paluka Story. All told, he appeared in several Broadway productions, thirty major films, several hundred television episodes, and more than nine thousand radio episodes. He was also known for being the author of several sophisticated humor books. His best known was Moteurs Guss Rams, 1967, ostensibly a collection of obscure French poems. In that book Van Rooten used French words and phrases that sounded like English mother goose rhymes, if you speak them aloud with a French accent. Notice the title Moteurs Guss Rams, sounds like mother goose rhymes. Van Rooten was married to Catherine Gaylord Kelly, and they had two children. He retired from acting in 1970 and returned to his first love, architecture. He designed his own retirement home in Chatham, Massachusetts. Van Rooten passed away June 17, 1973, in his Massachusetts home at the age of 66. Information for this biography was supplied by Brian Kavanaugh and was taken from the Internet Movie Database, Wikipedia, The New York Times Online, and from the website for Radio Spirits. For Old Time Radio Researchers, I'm your announcer, Patrick Andre. Thank you for listening.