Tall, deep-voiced character actor who started on screen in the lamentable Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) which would have taken him some time to live down. Thereafter, he was most comfortable playing the heavy, and never averse to do so in monster make-up, as in The Time Tunnel (1966) episode "Town of Terror." He was also the blue-faced alien hunter Megazor in the third season episode of Lost in Space (1965),"Hunter's Moon". Beck effectively lampooned his dark screen incarnations in several installments of The Monkees (1966), notably in "The Card Carrying Red Shoes." Beck's theatrical career went back as far as 1946, when he appeared in "A Flag is Born" on Broadway. He also had roles in "Peter Pan", "Oliver" and "Irma LaDouce" and was seen in TV commercials before making his bow in syndicated TV shows. A year before his death he became president of the New York section of the Screen Actor's Guild.