Ray Collins

Radio made him first. Collins worked in stock companies and on Broadway before becoming one of the busiest actors in American radio drama, a medium that rewarded exactly what he had: a voice able to carry authority, contempt or exhaustion with no face attached to it. He was a friend and associate of Orson Welles for years, and when the Mercury Theatre company went west, Collins went with it.

His feature debut is Citizen Kane in 1941, as Jim W. Gettys, Kane's political rival, and it sets the pattern for the two decades that follow. Collins specialised in men holding institutional power without any vanity about it: district attorneys, sheriffs, generals, admirals, bank officers, doctors. He played them with neither villainy nor warmth, as procedure with a pulse, which is why directors kept hiring him whenever a scene needed somebody to state the terms and walk out.

Welles used him again in The Magnificent Ambersons, and seventeen years after Kane, in Touch of Evil, where he is the district attorney trailing the mess. Around those came a very large body of studio work, more than seventy-five films, most of it in support and a good deal of it excellent.

Television then handed him the part that outlasted the movies. As Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the Los Angeles homicide detective on the losing side of every case Perry Mason took, he became a CBS fixture from 1957 onward, and for a generation of viewers that role, not the Welles pictures, was Ray Collins. He died in 1965.