Jan Merlin
American actor and writer (1925-2019)
Jan Merlin (born Jan Wasylewski, April 3, 1925 – September 20, 2019) was an American character actor, television writer, and author.
Early years
Born as Jan Wasylewski and reared in New York City. Merlin was of Polish American descent with ancestry in Poland. He attended the Grace Church School for Boys and later the renowned premier academic Stuyvesant High School in New York City, before dropping out to join the United States Navy, serving as a Torpedoman, during World War II. Onboard his ship, he wrote plays which was acted onboard. He later attended and graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.
Career
After Merlin's discharge from naval service, he worked in summer stock theater beginning in 1946, and then enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, making his Broadway debut in live theater in 1949 in Mister Roberts, which also starred Henry Fonda, (along with the subsequent feature film of the same title).
His professional acting career, which spanned more than five decades, included performances in stage plays on and off Broadway, radio dramas, live and filmed episodes of television series, and more than 30 feature motion pictures. His most recent performances were in live radio dramas broadcast in June 2010. In his film and television work, Merlin was frequently cast as the heavy, and consequently his character very often died onscreen. An early role for him was in the 1956 western playing Billy a small town boy getting mixed up with a gunfighter that dropped in the town in A Day of Fury.
“Jan Merlin” enters the record as american actor and writer (1925-2019). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Merlin, American and actor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Jan Merlin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Merlin, American and actor provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6149495. VIAF identifies the subject as 118149066699265602711. The Library of Congress control number is n86075637. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2019, 1946 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jan Merlin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.