John Randolph (actor) - Early Life

Early Life

Randolph was born Emanuel Hirsch Cohen in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants Dorothy (née Shorr), an insurance agent, and Louis Cohen, a hat manufacturer. His stepfather was Joseph Ted Romer Lippman, and as a result Randolph was briefly known as Mortimer Romer Lippman during his childhood. In the 1930s he was active in politics as well as acting. Randolph summered at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut which was the summer home of the Group Theatre (New York). Some of the other artists who summered there were; Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Will Geer, Clifford Odets, Howard Da Silva and Irwin Shaw. He made his Broadway debut in 1938 in Coriolanus. Randolph joined the United States Army Air Force in World War II.

He wound up blacklisted by the Hollywood studio bosses in 1955 after he refused to answer questions and claimed the Fifth Amendment before the HUAC relating to the Cold War Communist infiltration of the State Department. In 1988 he was elected president of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, which succeeded the National Council on Soviet Relations, founded in 1941. The NCSR grew out of the more overtly radical American-Soviet friendship movement of the 1930s, whose organizational center was the Friends of the Soviet Union founded in 1929. The Council, composed largely of professionals who were sympathetic to Socialism, believed that the USSR and the United States should join together in their common fight against fascism. In 1946, the House Un-American Activities Committee began a formal investigation of NCASF, and in 1947, it was indicted for failure to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board. Throughout its operation, the NCASF issued numerous pamphlets and bibliographies about life in the Soviet Union, as well as information on American-Soviet relations.