American radio, stage and screen actor, film director and film producer, the husband of actress Arlene Francis and father of law academic Peter Gabel.
One of Gabel’s earliest noted roles was as Neil Williams, a newspaper reporter, on the radio serial comedy Easy Aces in the mid-to-late 1930s. Gabel’s most noted work was as narrator and host of the 8 May 1945 CBS Radio broadcast of Norman Corwin’s epic dramatic poem On a Note of Triumph, a commemoration of the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of World War II in Europe. The broadcast was so popular that the CBS, NBC, Blue and Mutual networks broadcast a second live production of the program on 13 May. The Columbia Masterworks record label subsequently published an album of the 13 May production.
Gabel was first associated with Orson Welles when he played Javert in his six-part radio adaptation of Les Misérables (1937). He became one of the original members of Welles’s Mercury Theatre repertory company. On the stage Gabel portrayed Cassius in Caesar (1937), a critically acclaimed modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy streamlined into an anti-fascist tour de force, and starred as Danton in Danton’s Death (1938). On radio, he played Professor Van Helsing in “Dracula” (1938), the debut episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
In 1947, he directed his only film, The Lost Moment. Gabel appeared in few films over his career, usually in small roles. He played businessman Mr. Strutt in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), and the psychiatrist in the Billy Wilder version of The Front Page (1974) with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
Gabel won the 1961 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor for the comedy Big Fish, Little Fish; he was also noted for his performances in other Broadway productions.
He was a frequent guest panelist on the popular CBS Television Sunday night game show What’s My Line?, on which his wife, Arlene Francis, was a regular panelist.
Martin Gabel died in New York City from a heart attack on 22 May 1986, aged 74.
Link to Wikipedia biography