Donald Buka

Birthday: Aug 17, 1920

Bio: Leading man and character actor Donald Buka had a long career in television, interspersed with the occasional notable feature film, and work on Broadway bridged both ends. Born in Cleveland, OH, in 1920, he made his Broadway debut in a 1940 production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which was directed by Margaret Webster and ran for four months. He appeared in such… More Bio: Leading man and character actor Donald Buka had a long career in television, interspersed with the occasional notable feature film, and work on Broadway bridged both ends. Born in Cleveland, OH, in 1920, he made his Broadway debut in a 1940 production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which was directed by Margaret Webster and ran for four months. He appeared in such fare as the operatic musical Helen Goes To Troy (with a score adapted from Offenbach, and choreography by Leonide Massine), and made his big-screen debut in between these theater engagements, in Herman Shumlin's movie version of Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine (1943), starring Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. By the middle of the decade, both early television and films beckoned. Buka appeared in several early small-screen productions, as well as William Keighley's film noir The Street With No Name (1948). He then continued to squeeze in performances in feature films, including Gordon Douglas's Between Midnight and Dawn and Howard Hughes' notorious Vendetta (both 1950), between numerous appearances on anthology television series during the end of the 1940s and the early-to-mid-1950s. Buka also went to Vienna to star in Gunther Von Fritsch's drama Stolen Identity (1953), as a hapless, desperate cab driver caught in a web of deception. But after that film, he worked almost exclusively in television for the next decade, in everything from 77 Sunset Strip to Gomer Pyle, USMC. His last two feature film appearances came a decade apart, in Operation Eichmann (1961) and a small role in The Great White Hope (1970). Buka became a regular on All My Children in the 1980s, in between several stints on Broadway from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. Near the end of his life, Buka appeared at New York's Film Forum in connection with showings of Between Midnight and Dawn. He passed away in 2009. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi