Luis d'Antin van Rooten (November 29, 1906 – June 17, 1973) was a Mexican-born American actor, author, artist, designer and architect. He was sometimes credited as Louis Van Rooten.[2]
Van Rooten was born in 1906 in Mexico City, Mexico. His father worked as a translator and clerk at the American Embassy.[3] Some sources say his father was killed during the Mexican Revolution.[4]
In 1914, when he was 8, Van Rooten emigrated to the United States with his Belgian grandmother. Because he had no papers, his grandmother claimed van Rooten was her son, which resulted in the elongation of his name to Luis Ricardo Carlos Fernand d’Antin y Zuloaga van Rooten.[5]
Van Rooten attended a boarding school in Pennsylvania and earned his BA in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1927. He enjoyed a successful career as an architect in Cleveland, Ohio before his love for acting led to a career as one of radio and television's most prolific character actors and narrators.[6]
Van Rooten's obituary in The New York Times noted that he worked on as many as 50 shows a month because of his ability to do dialects and criminals. Once, he was bumped off in 10 crime shows in a week.[7][8]
His facility with languages made van Rooten an in-demand military radio announcer during World War II. He conducted a variety of broadcasts in Italian, Spanish, and French. This led to film work, often in roles requiring an accent or skill with dialects.
Van Rooten died June 17, 1973, in Chatham, Massachusetts in the retirement home he had designed himself.[9]
Van Rooten found steady work doing the narration in addition to acting in films, live television and radio dramas.
One of his first film narration jobs was Industrial Ohio, a 1938 film in the SOHIO Let's Explore Ohio series.[10]
He acted in The Mysterious Traveler and I Love a Mystery, and played "The Maestro" in the 1949 story "Bury Your Dead, Arizona" and as ranch foreman "Jasper" in the 1950 story "The Battle of the Century." He portrayed the evil Roxor in the late 1940s revival of the radio serial Chandu the Magician and portrayed the title character's sidekick, Denny, in Bulldog Drummond.[11] Van Rooten played Emilio in the radio soap opera Valiant Lady.[12] He also performed on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet (1958) and John Osborne's Luther (1963). In 1958 he guest-starred as murderer Samuel D. Carlin in the Perry Mason episode, "The Case of the One-Eyed Witness". Van Rooten also appeared in an uncredited role on The Honeymooners as Mr. Johnson, the landlord. In 1952, he played the fictional French detective Maigret in an episode of the anthology series Suspense.
In "Joey Was Different," the August 22, 1949 edition of Radio City Playhouse, he played sixteen different characters in addition to writing the script.[13]
Books
He is best known for his character work in films, but van Rooten was also a skilled artist and designer and the author of several sophisticated books of humor. These include Van Rooten's Book of Improbable Saints[14]The Floriculturist's Vade Mecum of Exotic and Recondite Plants, Shrubs and Grasses, and One Malignant Parasite[15] and Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d'Antin Manuscript.
Van Rooten is well known for his book Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d'Antin Manuscript (1967), a collection of poems, ostensibly written by an obscure and unsung Frenchman (with translations and commentary). Van Rooten used French words and phrases which, when spoken aloud with a French accent, produce English Mother Goose rhymes, a work of homophonic translation. The following example, when spoken aloud, sounds like the opening lines to "Humpty Dumpty":[16]
Un petit d'un petit S'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! Degrés te fallent
The above lines translated into English:
Child of a child
Astonished by Les Halles
Child of a child
Ah, you lack degrees
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