A founding voice of Chicago improvisation whose films caught only the edges of him: the pseudo-professor's digressions became, on screen, a run of clammy, patient villains. Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is the one to watch.
Fi1m perspective
In Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) Severn Darden does the interrogating. Don Murray's Governor Breck sweats and shouts; Darden's Kolp does not need to. He waits, and his patience is clammy, the patience of a man who has all afternoon and is not sorry about it. We found him more unpleasant than any of the shouting. Breck wants the scene over; Kolp would happily sit there all night. It is the best thing Darden did in a film, and it is a supporting part in a cheap one.
He came to this from a stage of a particular kind. Darden was with the Compass Players in Chicago in the mid-1950s and a founding member of Second City from 1959, working with the improv director Paul Sills. His signature was Professor Walther von der Vogelweide, a pseudo-intellectual whose lectures on metaphysics digressed until they fell over. The style was intellectual and wandering, half New Orleans surrealism and half Chicago causticness. That is a rare combination, and the films never found a use for it.
From the mid-1960s he took supporting parts on screen, and casting directors saw the eccentric and the sinister and stopped looking. Kropotkin in The President's Analyst (1967) let him amble, and it is the part people who remember him tend to name. Cecil in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) was straight drama. Kolp came twice, in Conquest and then Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and there was a dean, Dr Meredith, in Real Genius (1985). Then the character work thinned into semi-retirement, and he died in 1995.
An improviser's gift is time: the space to let a thought go wrong and follow it. Film rarely gave Darden any. Compare the two Kolps. In Conquest he has a prisoner and a few minutes, and he fills them. In Battle he has a greatcoat, an underground garrison and a permanent sneer, and he is good value, but that is all the film asks of him, and the battle of the title is a scuffle in a wood. The difference between the performances is the difference between the films.
He told Roger Ebert: "I don’t want to be known as the American Peter Sellers. I’d much rather be known as the California Arpad Steiner." He got neither. What he got was a shelf of small villains and one proper scene of quiet menace in a rubber-mask allegory, and if you want to see what the Chicago stage lost to Hollywood, start there, with the man who does not raise his voice.
Biography
Severn Darden was an American actor and comedian. Born in New Orleans, he attended the University of Chicago and performed with the Compass Players in the mid-1950s. He was a founding member of the Chicago comedy troupe The Second City when it opened in 1959.
Darden appeared in numerous films and television series. He played Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and reprised the role in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Other credits include roles in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Vanishing Point (1971), Real Genius (1985) and Back to School (1986), as well as guest appearances on series such as Cheers (1982) and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974).
He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1995.
