William Alland

William Alland's screen acting career is essentially a Mercury Theatre career. He was one of Orson Welles's people, and the credits show it: the reporter Jerry Thompson and the newsreel narrator in Citizen Kane, another reporter in The Falcon Takes Over the following year, an uncredited one in The Lady from Shanghai, the Second Murderer in Welles's Macbeth, and finally himself, decades on, in F for Fake and in a documentary about Welles.

Thompson is the strangest famous part in American film. He drives the entire structure of Citizen Kane, interviewing everyone who knew the late publisher, and he is deliberately never shown clearly, shot from behind, in shadow, at the edge of the frame, so the audience can slot itself into him. Alland also speaks the News on the March narration, which means one of the first voices of certainty you hear in the film belongs to the man who spends the rest of it asking what a word meant.

The acting was not the career. Alland became a producer, and his run of science fiction and monster pictures in the fifties, made largely with the director Jack Arnold, includes This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon films. Those are producer credits, so they sit outside the acting credits listed here, but they are the reason his name means anything to people who grew up on fifties monster movies.