Actor. Although he appeared in several notable films, he made his mark as one of TV's most distinctive bad guys of the 1960s and 1970s. Albert Paulson was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, of Norwegian descent; he would later change his surname to reflect its original spelling. He was educated at German boarding schools before moving to Los Angeles in 1942. After serving in the US Army during World War II, he moved to New York and used the GI Bill to study acting with Sanford Meisner and at the Actors Studio. He made his Broadway debut in Cocteau's "The Infernal Machine" (1958) and was later seen opposite Geraldine Page in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" (1964, and again in its 1966 movie adaptation). Paulsen's Hollywood career got off to a strong start when director John Frankenheimer gave him key roles in the features "All Fall Down" (1962) and "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), and in 1964 he won an Emmy as best supporting actor for "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (1963). With his shifty blue eyes, pocked, hawkish features, and vaguely foreign accent, the strangely charismatic Paulsen was much in demand to play Nazis, Communist spies, and gangsters of all nationalities on the small screen. He was cast in multiple episodes of "Combat!", "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", "Mission Impossible", and "Hawaii Five-O", and had memorably nasty one-shot appearances in such shows as "The Untouchables", "I Spy", "The F.B.I.", "Police Story", "The Rockford Files", "Starsky and Hutch", "Charlie's Angels", "Kojak", "Columbo", and "Scarecrow and Mrs. King". His other films include "Che!" (1969), "The Laughing Policeman" (1973), "The Next Man" (1975), and "Eyewitness" (1981). Paulsen got to display a charming, erudite side in his one-man show "Nabokov", based on Russian author Vladimir Nabokov; it opened in Los Angeles in 1982 and later toured nationally. From the late 1980s he was active in regional theatre. He died in his sleep at 78.