Obituary: Stefan Schnabel

AFTER A long career playing Middle European characters on stage, screen, television and radio, including a period with the Old Vic and an association with Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, the German actor Stefan Schnabel achieved his greatest fame and public recognition with a 17- year run in the television soap opera Guiding Light. He accepted this with equanimity, stating, "As an actor, if your role on a soap opera is long-lasting, it's possibly the only financial security you know, and it enables you to more or less pick and choose what you want to do with the rest of your time."

The son of the concert pianist Artur Schnabel, he was born in Berlin in 1912 (his mother Therese was a singer) and after attending the University of Bonn, studied at the Gruening School of Acting in Germany. In 1930 the family moved from Germany to Italy, and three years later Schnabel moved to London, where he joined the Old Vic, making his debut there as an off-stage wind noise in The Tempest (1933).

Subsequent roles included the Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra (1934) and Morrison in Major Barbara (1935). As Charles in As You Like It (1936) he wrestled with Michael Redgrave, and he supported such stars as John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Charles Laughton and (in Hamlet) Laurence Olivier.

Moving to New York in 1937 he found work in radio, including a role in the suspense series The Shadow starring Orson Welles, who asked Schnabel to join his Mercury Theatre players. He made his Broadway debut that year as Metellus Cimber in Welles's landmark production of Julius Caesar. Subtitled "The Death of a Dictator", it was played in modern dress, and had bold lighting effects to suggest the columns of light of the Nuremberg rallies.

Both production and performances met with acclaim and the following year Welles cast Schnabel in the adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds that started a nationwide panic when listeners thought that the United States had really been invaded by Martians. Schnabel played a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer who dies at the hands of the Martians. He recalled that after finishing his part he was sitting in the anteroom. "A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness."

Schnabel went on to appear in over 3,000 radio shows. On This is Our Enemy he often played Nazi roles, and during the Second World War he broadcast propaganda messages to his native Germany. Serving with the Office of Strategic Services during the war, he worked with the underground in England, Germany, France and Holland and was awarded a Certificate of Merit.

He made his screen debut in Welles's production Journey Into Fear (1942) and on Broadway he appeared with Welles in the Cole Porter musical Around the World in 80 Days (1946). Other Broadway roles included Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1944), Colonel Ikonenko in Peter Ustinov's The Love of Four Colonels (1953), Papa Yoder in the musical Plain and Fancy (1955) and General Hotzendorf in John Osborne's A Patriot for Me (1969). His last principal role on Broadway was in Mike Nichols's production of Andrew Bergman's Social Security (1986).

His films included several spy stories - for example as the head of a Communist espionage network in The Iron Curtain (1948). He made over 100 television appearances in prestigious dramatic shows before his role as Dr Stephen Jackson in Guiding Light. He was pleased, he said, that during his 17 years with the soap opera his character evolved from a grumpy physician to a more sympathetic surgeon.

In 1947 Schnabel married the actress Marion Kohler and for 45 years they lived in Connecticut, where they founded the Rainbow Theater, appearing together there in T.S. Eliot's The Confidential Clerk, Durrenmatt's The Physicists and other plays. In 1992 they moved to Rogaro, Italy, where they were living at the time of Stefan Schnabel's death.

Stefan Schnabel, actor: born Berlin 2 February 1912; married 1947 Marion Kohler (two sons, one daughter); died Rogaro, Italy 11 March 1999.