Orson Bean

Game shows paid Orson Bean's rent for the better part of three decades. Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1928, he came up as a comedian and stage actor, then became one of American television's professional panellists, most durably on To Tell the Truth, where the job was to be funny on demand in front of a studio audience and a live camera. Johnny Carson liked him enough to book him on The Tonight Show more than two hundred times.

That much exposure normally costs an actor his credibility in drama. It never cost Bean his. He turns up in Anatomy of a Murder in 1959 as Dr. Matthew Smith, playing medical testimony as something a jury might plausibly believe, and he played Loren Bray on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. His strangest screen work came in 1999 as Dr. Lester in Being John Malkovich, a courtly old employer with plans of his own, delivered in the tone of a man giving you directions to the bus stop. The comic timing built on panel shows is exactly what makes that performance land: he never signals that any of it is odd.

He also had a second life as a voice. Bean was Bilbo Baggins in the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit and returned for The Return of the King in 1980, doubling as Frodo, and he voiced Gepetto on Tiny Toon Adventures. The later credits are small and steady: Lydia's editor in Innerspace, a bit in Alien Autopsy, Laverne Fusselforth V on Another Period, an appearance on Women's Murder Club, and Sam Rubinstein in The Equalizer 2 in 2018. He was described as a storyteller par excellence, and the record here supports it. He died in 2020.