Dana Elcar

Read down Dana Elcar's credits and the same job keeps reappearing under different names: F.B.I. Agent Polk in The Sting, Capt. Battles in Soldier Blue, Capt. Hubris in Buddy Buddy, Inspector Shiller on Baretta, a district attorney on The Defenders, the Chief in The Nude Bomb. He was the man in the office, and American film and television needed one constantly from the mid-sixties onward.

He appeared in around forty films, usually as the second or third name on the call sheet: Fail Safe, The Boston Strangler, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, St. Ives, The Champ, All of Me, and 2010, where his Dimitri Moisevitch has to make a diplomatic warning sound like a favour. On television he was part of the rotation that kept Ironside, Mannix, Cannon and Alias Smith and Jones running, and he played Sheriff George Patterson on Dark Shadows.

MacGyver made him a fixture. Elcar first appeared in the pilot as Andy Colson, a completely different character, before being cast as Pete Thornton, the Phoenix Foundation supervisor who spent the series being the only adult in the room. The part suited exactly what he was good at: authority without pomposity, and the sense that the paperwork was real and somebody had to sign it. He died in 2005.