
His toughest gig may have come on 'The List of Adrian Messenger,' for which he received no screen credit.
Jan Merlin, who played villains in dozens of films and TV shows and good guys on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and The Rough Riders, died Friday in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 94.
In a painful year in England and Ireland in which he served as a "movable prop" and received no screen credit, Merlin donned masks and heavy makeup to portray several characters and substitute for Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and others in John Huston's The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). He then wrote a 2001 novel, Shooting Montezuma, based on that experience.
Merlin wrote several other books, many in collaboration with William Russo, who wrote Saturday in a blog post: "Most of our Hollywood history tales were based on his insider knowledge of how a set works, from knowing nearly every star of the 1950s and 1960s. [Merlin] laughed they were all 'six feet tall,' no matter what the truth might be."
Merlin also spent about five years as a writer on the NBC soap Another World, winning a Daytime Emmy in 1975 and receiving another nomination two years later.