Actor Kerwin Mathews, best known for his fantasy and horror film roles, died in his sleep 5 July 2007, according to Tom Nicoll, his partner of 46 years. Born 8 January 1926 in Seattle, Washington, he fought opposite the skeleton Ray Harryhausen had yet to create in his stop-motion classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
Mathews served two years in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and then attended Beloit (Wisconsin) College on drama and music scholarships. He stayed at Beloit three years after graduating to teach speech and dramatic arts, and then moved to Hollywood in 1954.
His genre film credits include: Nightmare in Blood (1978), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), Octaman (1971), Battle Beneath the Earth (1967), Maniac (1963), Jack the Giant Killer (1962), and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960). He appeared in made-for-tv genre movies such as: Death Takes a Holiday (1971), Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisedon (1969), and Ghostbreakers (1967). And he appeared in a 1954 episode of Space Patrol.
In a 1987 interview with Starlog magazine, Mathews said that filming the sword fight with the skeleton in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was “an exciting experience for me. I believed I was making as valid a contribution to the world of theater as if I had been playing Hamlet. We shot that sword fight in a cave in Majorca. We started filming one night at sundown and worked straight through for 24 hours, because they could only afford the cave for one night.”
Mathews’s favorite role was starring as composer Johann Strauss Jr. in “The Waltz King,” a 1963 two-part segment of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color that was filmed on location in Europe.
Mathews, who moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, spent his post-acting career selling antiques and furniture.