John Dehner

Dehner worked for half a century and was almost never the reason you sat down. Born in 1915, he built the deepest kind of American character career, hundreds of credits from the late 1930s to the late 1980s, mostly playing sophisticated con men, shady authority and smooth-talking villains. He had the voice for it, dry and educated, which meant a director could cast him as the banker, the colonel or the judge and get a hint of corruption thrown in free.

The Western is where he lived. He was Pat Garrett in The Left Handed Gun, Claude Tobin in Man of the West, Weddle in Apache, and a recurring presence across Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Rawhide, Maverick, The Virginian, The High Chaparral and half a dozen other series that now exist mainly as syndication. His best single television part may be Burgundy Smith on The Westerner, the sort of gentlemanly antagonist he could have played in his sleep and never did.

He was also very funny when asked. Later work put him in Support Your Local Gunfighter, Fun with Dick and Jane and Airplane II: The Sequel, where the deadpan authority he had spent decades building becomes the joke itself. He is Rumfoord in Slaughterhouse-Five, Henry Wheelock in The Boys from Brazil, a judge in Jagged Edge, and, in an oddity from the very start of the run, a storyboard artist in Disney's The Reluctant Dragon. He died in 1992.