Jeff Maxwell
Jeff Maxwell is an actor, born 1947.
Jeff Maxwell was hired on M*A*S*H as an extra during the first season, and then the production fired Alan Alda's stand-in and handed him the job. That is how a lot of careers actually happen. He stayed with the show until it finished in 1983, kept the recurring part of Private Igor Straminsky, and ended up in 83 episodes, including the finale, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.
Eighty-three episodes of an eleven-year run is a strange and rather enviable thing to have on a resume. Igor was never a lead and rarely a plot. He was furniture that talked, which is a real and undervalued job on a long-running ensemble show, and the audience knew the face long before it could have named him.
The rest of the filmography here is small and, in two cases, extremely good company. He is an uncredited medical student in Young Frankenstein and a man in the Feel-A-Round segment of The Kentucky Fried Movie, which puts him inside two of the defining American comedies of the 1970s. There is also a credit on the family drama Eight Is Enough.
Movies (2)
TV (2)
Where to start with Jeff Maxwell
One credit dominates, so start there. M*A*S*H is the reason for this page, and Igor is a recurring presence across eleven seasons rather than a character with episodes of his own, so watch the show as a show and let him surface.
Young Frankenstein is the best film on the list and he is uncredited in it, which is exactly the sort of trivia that makes a filmography worth reading. The Kentucky Fried Movie is the other 1970s comedy landmark here, a sketch film whose Feel-A-Round segment actually hands him something to play.
Eight Is Enough is the completist entry, a big-family drama from the same stretch of American network television that M*A*S*H was quietly outlasting.