Gordon Sterne

Gordon Sterne was a German-born English actor with a prolific career spanning over five decades in film, television, and theater. He is perhaps most widely recognized for his role as Mr. Kessler in the horror-comedy classic An American Werewolf in London (1981), where his character famously meets a gruesome end while watching The Muppet Show in a dream sequence.

He left his native Nazi-dominated birth country in 1941 and became a native of Windsor, Ontario with a father who worked in the tobacco business and mother, who was supportive of his theatre aspirations. Sterne studied economics at the University of Western Ontario before volunteering for the Canadian Army in 1944, serving in the infantry as a sergeant. Heading to New York in 1945, he trained and graduated from the Dramatic Workshop under the tutelage of its founder Erwin Piscator, at the same time as Rod Steiger, Bea Arthur, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis and Harry Belafonte. Sterne then began his acting career in America, working on radio and TV, in summer stock and off-Broadway.