Peter Brocco

Who was Peter Brocco?

Peter Brocco was an American film and TV character actor for nearly 60 years.

He appeared as a criminal type in several episodes of Adventures of Superman. He holds the distinction of having been killed off in two of them, a relative rarity for villains in the series. In the first, The Secret of Superman, he deduces that Kent is Superman, but is killed in a police shootout soon after. In The Clown Who Cried, he falls off a building and Superman is unable to save him. He also appeared as "The Spector" in The Phantom Ring, where the criminals developed a machine that can make them invisible. Finally, in that episode, he survives, albeit rather banged up by Superman.

He appeared as an Organian council member in the Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy" which established the uneasy treaty of peace between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire.

For fans of those two series, it is noteworthy that he and Jeff Corey appeared in both series, and that both men were blacklisted for a while during the red scare of the early 1950s.

Brocco played Colonel Matterson, a patient suffering from dementia, in the Academy Award-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.