William Hopper

William Hopper was the only child of the stage comedian DeWolf Hopper and of Hedda Hopper, whose Hollywood column could end a career. He got work, a great deal of it, and almost none of it was worth having. Look at what the studios handed him in 1939 alone: a sergeant in Stagecoach, a party guest in Midnight, an interne in The Return of Doctor X, a reporter in Dust Be My Destiny. Most were uncredited. He is somewhere in The Maltese Falcon as a reporter and in Air Force as another sergeant. More than eighty features across the 1930s and 1940s, and almost no trace of him in any of them.

So he stopped. He joined the Navy, served through the Second World War, and did not go back to acting until William Wellman talked him into it in the 1950s. Wellman used him twice in 1954, in Track of the Cat and The High and the Mighty, and the second act turned out far better than the first: Judy's father in Rebel Without a Cause, Col. Kenneth Penmark in The Bad Seed, and Colonel Robert Calder in 20 Million Miles to Earth, the officer whose expedition to Venus brings something home with it.

Then Perry Mason arrived in 1957 and settled the question. As the private detective Paul Drake, Hopper spent the whole run doing the legwork that let Raymond Burr win in court, and it is the only role most people can name. A last, odd credit follows: an uncredited judge in Myra Breckinridge. He died in 1970.