DeVeren Bookwalter honed his TV and movie acting talents originally in
stage work in New York. From the east he moved to Los Angeles in the
early 1970s, to plumb the opportunities of West Coast acting. One of
the first of varied small roles in his new movie career was Der Omega-Mann (1971).
Bookwalter had a particular passion for Shakespeare and found an
adequate outlet in his association with R. Thad Taylor's Shakespeare
Society of America in West Hollywood. Working out of a
turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion converted to several production
stages, the SSA was especially devoted to performing all of
Shakespeare's plays with a pool of LA legitimate theater, TV, and movie
talent. Bookwalter played Feste the Clown in the SSA's ambitious
Twelfth Night (1971)which used the mansion's massive backyard patio as
the central stage. The production included young British actors Vincent Mongol
and Vickery Turner and veteran funny man Avery Schreiber. When the mansion's owners
tore it down in early 1972 (for the proverbial parking lot), Taylor
moved the SSA to a converted garage a few miles north and with
Bookwalter and the addition of a varied trove of talented volunteers
constructed within it a half scale model of the Globe Theater.
Reconstituting the new location as the LA Globe Theater, the SSA
continued the goal of completing Shakespeare's plays, along with a
steady insertion of new plays and some modern classics. Bookwalter took
the helm as director and star in the SSA's acclaimed Cyrano de Bergerac
(1975) which garnered the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for
production, director, and lead performance for that year. The SSA
completed the Shakespeare collection of plays in 1976-77 season, and
Bookwalter once again moved into movies, including the American TV
production of Othello (1981). His most notable movie role was as the
home grown terrorist leader Bobby Maxwell in the Clint Eastwood continuing
Dirty Harry installment Der Unerbittliche (1976). Thereafter Bookwalter moved into the
steady work of soap operas (1982-84) and finally returned to New York
where he passed away before his time in 1987.
