Ben Lackland

Ben Lackland came to New York in 1925 to study at the Theater Guild School and lived in Manhattan until 1958. During his career, he appeared in many plays with such figures as Josephine Hull, Walter Hampden, Ruth Gordon, Otis Skinner and Ethel Barrymore. He met his future wife, stage actress Marjorie Dulin, during the Lakeland Players' production of "Yes, My Darling Daughter" in Maine, and he played in thirty Broadway productions before switching to the infant medium of television in 1946. By 1950 he was a five-night-a-week regular on "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" as the benevolent Commissioner of Public Safety Charles Carey. He was 58 when he died at home from an overdose of barbiturates. The Essex County Medical Examiner's Office's autopsy report said that Ben Lackland was a "suicide by ingestion of an overdose of sleeping pills."