Oklahoma-born Lou Antonio is English-French-German on his mother’s side and Greek on his father’s side. A talented baseball player as a teenager, he was scouted by the Boston Red Sox while in high school, but an injury ended his dreams of playing professional baseball. He attended Oklahoma University on a journalism scholarship and graduated with a degree in French, all the while acting in school plays. Accepted into the prestigious Actors Studio in 1958, Antonio was a working actor through much of the 1960s, doing summer stock, plays, TV guest roles, and the occasional movie, most notably Cool Hand Luke (1967). After moving to Hollywood, TV work became more consistent over the next 40+ years, both as an actor, such as in Star Trek: The Original Series: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969), and even more as a director.