Mike Kellin

Kellin was a New York stage actor who treated screen work as the day job, and it shows in the best possible way: he never looks like he is performing for a camera. The theatre gave him the honours, an Obie for the original Off-Broadway run of American Buffalo and a Tony nomination for the musical Pipe Dream. Film and television gave him the steady money.

His face and voice were built for one specific American type: the tired functionary, the sergeant, the father who has run out of patience and money at the same moment. He is Sergeant McVey in At War with the Army as far back as 1950, Private Kolinsky in Hell Is for Heroes, Harry Purvis on the terrorised subway car of The Incident, a deputy commissioner in God Told Me To, a lieutenant in Freebie and the Bean. He worked constantly through the anthology and procedural era, in Naked City, Route 66, Johnny Staccato and Lost in Space, and he appears in the 1960 film The Wackiest Ship in the Army, whose television version later gave him a starring role as Chief Petty Officer Willie Miller.

The best thing he did on film came late. In Midnight Express he plays Mr. Hayes, a father visiting his son in a Turkish prison, and the scene is unbearable precisely because Kellin refuses to lift it into melodrama; he plays a man being polite in a room where politeness is useless. He was still working at the end. Sleepaway Camp came out in 1983, the year he died, and he is the camp owner, the only adult in the film with any warmth in him.