Paul Kent

Paul Kent was an American actor and the man behind the Melrose Theatre in West Hollywood, where he worked as artistic director and taught acting for years. A Brooklyn native, he learned his craft at the Pasadena Playhouse and with Sanford Meisner, whose classes he helped run and whose methods he passed on in the West. Lucille Ball's Desilu Workshop signed him as its first student. He started the Melrose in 1964 and in 1977 moved it into a larger building on Seward Street. In 1986 the theater premiered The Bar Off Melrose, a play he had commissioned from many writers. On screen he played Commander Beach in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), guested on Lou Grant, T. J. Hooker, Falcon Crest and Port Charles, and took the role of Mack Sennett in Return to Babylon, released in 2013. He died in 2011.