Stuart Margolin

Margolin spent the 1960s as a face you half recognised. He was on Ensign O'Toole, He & She, The Second Hundred Years, That Girl, Love, American Style, It Takes a Thief and The Partridge Family, where the character was called Snake, which tells you the casting logic. Then he turned up on Nichols as Deputy Mitch Mitchell, and the association with James Garner that would define him was set.

Angel Martin is one of the great supporting inventions in American television. On The Rockford Files he is the informant who is always lying, always selling out his only friend, and always somehow forgiven by the following week. Margolin plays him with a wheedling half-smile and a physical cringe that arrives a beat before the punch does, and two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series came out of it. He carried a version of the same creature over to Bret Maverick as Philo Sandeen.

He directed too, taking a further two Emmy nominations for it and a Directors Guild of America award, and the 1993 family comedy Double, Double, Toil and Trouble is the directing credit listed here. The film work stayed character work throughout: Little Joe in Kelly's Heroes, Aimes Jainchill in Death Wish, a mill foreman in Days of Heaven, a studio man in S.O.B., and, decades later, an old family lawyer in Arbitrage. He died in 2022.