Rex Reason

Interviewed in Tom Weaver's book, "They Fought in the Creature Features" (McFarland & Co., 1995).

In 1961, he was offered the role of Raymond Shaw in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by Frank Sinatra as a professional nod to him since they had done a screen test together for Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953) and Sinatra liked his work on the Warner Bros. TV series The Roaring 20's (1960). However, Reason had just quit the motion picture business to go into real estate, and could not be reached, so Sinatra cast Laurence Harvey instead.

Played Scott Norris, a reporter, in the two-season series The Roaring 20's (1960) but left after the first season when he decided to drop out of the acting business. With nothing to fall back on, he attended real estate school, got his license and became a successful agent. Met third wife Shirley Anne, a divorcée with three young daughters, a few months later at his office and married her after a three-year courtship.

Came down with a life-threatening case of encephalitis while starring in his western TV series Man Without a Gun (1957), but recovered. He illness eventually forced him to take ten months off of work. Fortunately his residuals from the TV series kept him financially secure while he was recuperating.

Best remembered for his two leading man scientist roles in the sci-fi classics This Island Earth (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).

Rex Reason was born in Germany, while his family was in Europe on a business trip. Although he grew up in Los Angeles, his acting aspirations were nil; his mother, however, hoped that both Rex and his lookalike brother Rhodes Reason would get into the acting profession. He played the lead in "Seventh Heaven" at Glendale's Hoover High School, then enlisted in the army at 17. After his discharge, he enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse and then became involved in little theater. Reason was top-billed in his very first movie, Storm Over Tibet (1952), then played smaller parts in pictures at Columbia and MGM. A contract player at Universal-International, he allowed the studio to bill him as "Bart Roberts" in two features before he balked and insisted on going back to his own name.

Attended both Hoover High and Hollhywood High Schools in the Los Angeles area. He quit high school in his senior year and enlisted in the Army from 1946 to 1948.