Don Keefer

The Actors Studio counted him among its founding members, and he was in both the original Broadway production and the 1951 film of Death of a Salesman, neither of which is among the credits listed here. What Keefer (1916 to 2014) built after that is one of the longer character careers on American screens: the earliest credit on this page is a 1950 television anthology, the last a 1997 studio comedy.

He was the man in the room who had to say the difficult sentence. Doctors, lawyers, reporters, court stenographers, junior partners, the parts that carry information so the leads can react to it. He is the court stenographer in The Caine Mutiny (1954), a reporter in Riot in Cell Block 11 the same year, Dr. Tryon in Sleeper (1973), Dr. Lamar Stivers in Walking Tall (1973), Dr. Pullbrook in The Car (1977), a fireman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Doc Grissom in Robert Aldrich's The Grissom Gang (1971). Wikipedia describes his versatility across comedy and heavy drama, and the list bears it out.

Television carried the bulk of the work. Wikipedia puts his longest-running roles at ten episodes each of Gunsmoke and the sitcom Angel, neither of them large; he did The Twilight Zone in 1959 and Roots: The Next Generations twenty years later. By the 1990s he was playing single scenes in studio comedies, and his final credit here is a beggar outside a courthouse in Liar Liar (1997), which is a fitting close to a career of one clear beat delivered without fuss.