October 19 was the birthday of actor George Nader (1921-2002).
Lebanese-American Nader was a local L.A. kid who studied theatre at Occidental College, got experience at Pasadena Playhouse, and began playing bit parts in movies around 1950. Then came his unlikely big-break:
In 1953, he was cast at the male lead in the low-budget horror picture Robot Monster (which turns 70 years old this year). Robot Monster long stood alongside the films of Ed Wood and fare like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians in the old school canon of “Worst Films of All Time”. (I refer to it in the past tense because the camp revolution of the 1970s sort of rehabilitated all of these films, creating a framework for appreciation that ultimately makes the label inapplicable, or at least debatable. Most of these movies have acquired cults of worshippers over the past half century, and it is impolite to criticize a person’s religion.)
Anyway, impossible as it may be to conceive, Robot Monster proved to be Nader’s calling card to success as a leading man in mainstream Hollywood films for about a decade, and then overseas in Europe and the Philippines after that. For a time he was a sort of lesser Rock Hudson or Jeff Chandler. And his body of work tended to be kind of offbeat and campy. I would quite honestly find it a rewarding experience to have a George Nader Film Festival. His movies include Sins of Jezebel (1953), Carnival Story (1954), Miss Robin Crusoe (1954), The Second Greatest Sex (1955), Lady Godiva of Coventry (1955), Congo Crossing (1956), Four Girls in Town (1957), and The Female Animal (1958).
In 1959 he starred in two short-lived TV series: The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen, and The Man and the Challenge. He returned to films as the title character in The Secret Mark of D’Artagnan (1962), followed by two Albert Zugsmith pictures Zigzag and The Great Space Adventures in 1963, and another sci fi flick The Human Duplicators (1965), which pretty much returned him to his low-budget origins. At this stage he moved to West Germany, starring in film and television there, but he also appeared in a couple of well-known AIP ventures in 1967, The Million Eyes of Sumuru and The House of 1,000 Dolls. In 1973 he appeared in Eddie Romero’s Beyond Atlantis with Patrick Wayne, John Ashley, and Sid Haig. His final acting gig was a 1974 episode of the TV show Nakia with Robert Forster.
Nader’s early(ish) retirement from acting was the result of a car accident that had damaged his eyes. This didn’t prevent him from being creative. He wrote a 1978 sci-fi novel called Chrome, about a love affair between a man and an android, and another book (still unpublished) called The Perils of Paul. Nader was gay, and was in a long-term relationship with an actor named Mark Miller. Both men were beneficiaries of Rock Hudson’s will in 1985.
Not for nothing: George Nader shared a birthday with Robert Reed, Divine, and Tor Johnson!
(Travalanche) 
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