Michael Forest, the strapping actor who starred in Beast From Haunted Cave and other B-pictures for Roger Corman and made memorable guest-star appearances on classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Star Trek, has died. He was 97.
Forest was living in a facility for seniors in Sparks, Nevada, and died Wednesday, his friend James A. Brown announced.
A native of North Dakota, Forest also made more than 20 movies in Spain, France and England — among them 100 Rifles (1969), starring Jim Brown and Raquel Welch — and was a very busy voice actor who was fluent in Italian, dubbing more than 500 films while living in Rome from 1968-78.
Six-foot-3 and 215 pounds in his prime, Forest had recently moved to Los Angeles when he met Corman in an acting class and was hired to play the whip-cracking barbarian Zarko in The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), starring Richard Devon, Abby Dalton and Jonathan Haze.
That led him to snowy Deadwood, South Dakota, and a turn as local guide Gil Jackson in the horror heist movie Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), produced by Roger’s brother, Gene Corman, and featuring Chris Robinson as the monster. (Monte Hellman, who lived in the same apartment building as Forest at the time, made his feature directing debut on the film.)
One day after finishing work on Beast From Haunted Cave, Forest was back at it, starring as an American soldier in the Roger Corman-directed war flick Ski Troop Attack (1960). And after that, he quickly headed to Athens to portray the title hero in Atlas (1960), with Corman seeking to horn in on the popular Hercules pictures that starred Steve Reeves.
Forest played one of the three motorcycle-riding brothers from another planet (Lee Kinsolving and Tom Gilleran were the others) sent to wipe out humans on Earth on the Twilight Zone episode “Black Leather Jackets,” which starred Shelley Fabares and premiered on Jan. 22, 1964.
Nine days later, he was on CBS again on The Dick Van Dyke Show as a former love interest of Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) who’s now a priest — getting set up with Rose Marie’s Sally Rogers was great for a few laughs — on the episode “The Life and Love of Joe Coogan.”
And on the second-season Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” that first aired in September 1967, Forest portrayed the Greek god Apollo who demands that the crew of the Starship Enterprise worship him as he falls for Lt. Carolyn Palamas (fellow guest star Leslie Parrish).
In 2013, he returned as Apollo on the fan-produced series Star Trek Continues to work alongside his late wife, Diana Hale, as Athena.
Gerald Michael Charlebois was born on April 17, 1929, in Harvey, North Dakota. He moved with his family as a youngster to Seattle and said he decided to pursue acting — instead of boxing — after seeing a friend perform at the Seattle Rep Playhouse.
After he attended the University of Washington and San Jose State, he moved to L.A. in 1955, appeared on an episode of Highway Patrol and started acting for the Players Ring theater company in West Hollywood. He first met Roger Corman in an acting class that both were taking with noted teacher Jeff Corey.
“One day he said to me, ‘Look, Mike, do you want to do this picture [Viking Women]?’” Forest recalled in an interview for Tom Weaver’s 2001 book, I Was a Monster Movie Maker. “‘It’d be nothing more than kind of a glorified stuntman, but if you want to do it, fine.’ I said, ‘Sure.’”
He spent five weeks in South Dakota on Beast From Haunted Cave and Ski Troop Attack and told Weaver he was paid $2,500. “I got $500 a week,” he said. “I think at that time, minimum weekly was $350 and I got $500 — I held out for big bucks!”
Also in 1960, he recurred as the French Canadian rogue Pierre Duran alongside Roger Moore on the Warner Bros./ABC adventure series The Alaskans.
He wound up under contract at Warners — and later Universal — and worked on everything from Zorro, Bat Masterson, Maverick, Bonanza, Have Gun — Will Travel, Lawman, The Rifleman, Death Valley Days and Wagon Train to Dr. Kildare, Gomer Pyle: USMC, The Outer Limits, Perry Mason, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gunsmoke, Combat!, Gilligan’s Island and Get Smart through the end of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, Forest was doing lots of Shakespeare, playing Othello three times and appearing as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew at the Old Globe in San Diego. (He landed his Star Trek gig after someone at the theater recommended him.)
Back from Europe, he lived in New York while playing Nick Andropoulos, owner of the Greek restaurant The Plakka, on the CBS soap As the World Turns from 1980-82.
Later, Forest portrayed the wealthy older millionaire who has a fatal heart attack after an intense sadomasochistic encounter with Madonna’s Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence (1993) and was a pilot in the Tom Hanks-starring Cast Away (2000).
He and Hale were married for 52 years until her death in 2022.
“I look back, and it certainly hasn’t been what you might call a distinguished career, but on the other hand, it hasn’t been bad,” he once said. “Some of the things that I’ve done, I take a great deal of pride in. But, like all actors, you do work in material and situations that are not what you want, and you try to make it the best you can. Acting has its ups and its downs.”