Tall, distinguished, aristocratic Louis Calhern seemed to be the poster boy for old-money, upper-crust urban society, but he was actually born Carl Vogt, to middle-class parents in New York City. His family moved to St. Louis when he was a child, and it was while playing football in high school there that he was spotted by a representative of a touring acting troupe and hired as an actor. He returned to New York to work in the theater, but his career was interrupted by military service in France in World War I. He returned to the stage after the war, and eventually broke into films. Although his regal bearing would seem to pigeonhole him in aristocratic parts in serious drama, he proved to be a very versatile actor, as much at home playing a comic foil to 'The Marx Brothers' when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
In 1950 he replaced Frank Morgan as Buffalo Bill, when Morgan died of a heart attack while filming Annie Get Your Gun . In 1956, Paul Ford replaced Calhern when Calhern died of a heart attack while filming The Teahouse of the August Moon .
In Executive Suite he plays an unscrupulous businessman who tries to take advantage of the situation after the president of a corporation dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. Calhern also died suddenly from the same cause.
Appeared as a character in Gore Vidal s 1974 novel "Myron," his sequel to Myra Breckinridge , co-starring with Maria Montez and Bruce Cabot in the apocryphal movie "Siren of Babylon" that is being shot on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in 1948 in the novel. In the "movie," Calhern "played" the role of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar.
Calhern joined the famed actors club, The Lambs, in NYC in 1922.
