His film debut was in the Canadian film Butler's Night Off (1951). His first feature role came in the MGM film The Brothers Karamazov (1958) with Yul Brynner, in which he starred as the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, Alexei.
I think it was a movie called the racist. It's where he goes into a bigoted white town and start stirring up trouble because they're going to stop segregating schools. I've never seen him act so serious.