Ian Wolfe

Ian Wolfe worked in the theatre until 1934, then spent the next fifty-six years in front of cameras. Born in Canton, Illinois in 1896, he took his first film role that year and his last screen credit came in 1990, two years before his death. Sources disagree wildly on the total, somewhere between two hundred and seventy and four hundred credits, and the disagreement itself tells you how he worked: constantly, briefly, and usually as somebody official.

The catalogue here maps the niche precisely. He is Rev. Elcott in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Father Joseph in The Frisco Kid, Father Juniper in Soap and an uncredited rector in Johnny Belinda. He is a barrister in Three Strangers, jury foreman in The Verdict, a justice of the peace in The Fortune, registrar of births in Random Harvest, Commissioner of Scotland Yard in Dressed to Kill. He plays two American presidents: Calvin Coolidge in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell and, uncredited, James K. Polk in California.

Diction is what made him useful. Wolfe delivered procedural language, legal, clerical and medical, as though it were the only reasonable thing a person could say, which is why directors kept handing him the scene where the plot has to be explained without the audience noticing. Hitchcock used him twice, in Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur. He is the apothecary in the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, Caius Ligarius in Julius Caesar and Dr. Minton in Rebel Without a Cause.

The late credits are the surprise. He surfaces in THX 1138 in 1971, in Reds, in Amazing Stories, and finally as a forger in Dick Tracy in 1990.