* Ted Roter; Founder of Santa Monica Playhouse

Ted Roter, 70, founder of the Santa Monica Playhouse. Roter started an actors group in 1962, and the next year he opened the Santa Monica Playhouse, a 75-seat theater that became a venue for works by such playwrights as Moliere, Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco. Roter was a native of Brussels who discovered acting as a child in refugee camps in France during World War II. He was separated from his family when his mother was taken by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp and his father fled to England. In the refugee camps, he was recruited to act in plays and learned to make people laugh. Years later, after the war ended and he finished his schooling, he immigrated to the United States and became an actor. When Roter and his wife, Bella, opened the Santa Monica Playhouse, he produced mostly comedies and ran actors workshops based on the Stanislavsky method. He produced or directed more than 30 plays there, including a long run of Genet’s black comedy “The Balcony.” He also had roles in more than 100 television shows and wrote several plays. Roter sold the playhouse in the early 1970s to two former students and worked in film until his retirement in the mid-1980s. On Oct. 29 of a heart attack in his West Los Angeles home.