Actor Michael Ansara

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Actor Michael Ansara

Ansara was born in Syria, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old. They resided in Lowell, Massachusetts, for a decade before moving to California. He originally wanted to be a physician, but developed a passion for becoming a performer after he began taking acting classes to overcome his shyness.

It was the popular TV series Broken Arrow (1956), where he played the lead role of Cochise, that raised Ansara's profile and made him a household name on television. Whilst making the series, the 20th Century Fox Publicity Department arranged a date between Ansara and actress Barbara Eden. The two later married and Ansara guest-starred on Eden's I Dream of Jeannie series, as the Blue Djinn, who had imprisoned Jeannie in a bottle, and as King Kamehameha in the episode "The Battle of Waikiki". The couple had one son together, actor Matthew Ansara, who died on June 25, 2001, of a heroin overdose. Michael Ansara and Barbara Eden divorced in 1974.

Another success of Ansara was the TV series Law of the Plainsman (1959, with Gina Gillespie and Robert Harland), where he performed as Indian U.S. Marshal Sam Buckhart. This show was a spin-off of the Rifleman. In 1961, he appeared as Carl in the epiode "Night Visitors" of the NBC anthology series, The Barbara Stanwyck Show.

Michael Ansara also played in the Biblical epics The Ten Commandments (1956) as the taskmaster and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) as Herod's commander.

Michael Ansara on Star Trek

He is one of six actors to play the same character (Kang) on three different Star Trek TV series - the original series (Day of the Dove), Deep Space Nine (Blood Oath) and Voyager (Flashback). The other actors who hold this distinction are Jonathan Frakes (Riker, TNG, Voyager and Enterprise), Marina Sirtis (Troi, TNG, Voyager and Enterprise), Armin Shimerman (Quark, TNG, DS9 and Voyager), John de Lancie (Q, TNG, DS9 and Voyager), and Richard Poe (Gul Evek, TNG, DS9 and Voyager). He also provided the voice of Q's supervisor in the Next Generation episode "True Q" and played Lwaxana Troi's husband Jeyal on the Deep Space Nine episode, "The Muse".

Other Shows

Ansara played "The Ruler" on episode 122, "The Challenge", of the TV series "Lost in Space" (March 2, 1966) with a young Kurt Russell as his son "Quano".

In 1967, Ansara guest starred in the episode "A War for the Gravediggers" of the NBC western series The Road West starring Barry Sullivan, Andrew Prine, and Glenn Corbett.

Ansara played "Killer Kane" in the 1979-1980 season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and previously played two different characters in two episodes of the 1966 Sci-Fi TV series The Time Tunnel. In episode #11, he played Colonel Hruda and in episode #28 played The Curator. He also played the title role in the acclaimed The Outer Limits original series episode "Soldier", written by Harlan Ellison. He narrated Paul Goble's "The Gift of the Sacred Dog" at Crow Agency, Montana, on June 17, 1983, and Sheila MacGill Callahan's "And Still the Turtle Watched" on October 21, 1993, on the PBS series Reading Rainbow.

Ansara had a memorable role as the Technomage Elric in the sci-fi television series Babylon 5. He appeared in the episode "The Geometry of Shadows", in which Elric and his fellow Technomages go into hiding, anticipating the return of the Shadows and the subsequent great war that will tear the galaxy apart. Elric was the first character to foretell Londo Mollari's rise to power, and the grave implications of that ascension.

In recent years, he performed the voice of Mister Freeze in Batman: The Animated Series as well as one of its two spinoff animated movies spinoff animated shows.

Ansara is now semi-retired.