Dabbs Greer: The Unsung Icon

"Hello everybody. My name is Mike Jones and welcome to The Faces of Film. There's really never been a shortage of documentation over the years about the many beloved film stars, both past and present, from the cinema. But much less love and attention has been showered on the lesser, but equally important, supporting players or featured characters, actors who were stars in their own right. These are the faces we all know, familiar, but whose names tend to escape us. The Faces of Film is about them, a long-overdue focus on the many talented performers who were always a welcome addition to any production.

Our spotlight today is on one of the very best of these unsung players. His name was Dabbs Greer. In a career that spanned close to 60 years, Dabbs Greer was one of the most familiar faces on film and especially on television. Greer played every kind of role imaginable, from merchants to bartenders, clergymen, doctors, businessmen, beat cops, and many other pillars of the community, as well as assorted villains in his long career.

With his plain face and thinning wavy hair and mellow, distinctive voice, he was a solid supporting actor who significantly influenced TV acting through his versatile character portrayals and his consistent presence on television, which showcased his ability to adapt to a wide variety of diverse roles. Across a remarkable 60-year career, Dabbs Greer appeared in over 100 feature films, but he is perhaps better remembered for his prolific work on television, where he appeared in nearly 600 roles in roughly 200 different TV series, playing every kind of character imaginable. Greer's career flourished during the rise of television in the 1960s, where he became a reliable fixture of many family-oriented dramas and sitcoms. Greer was also highly visible on a myriad of TV westerns. His genial, unassuming personality and his down-home delivery made him a natural fit for the genre.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Greer was a constant presence on television. Hardly a week went by where you couldn't spot him on any number of popular shows. Greer embodied the archetype of the everyman, making him very relatable to audiences. He is probably best remembered for his role as Reverend Alden on Little House on the Prairie from 1974 to 1983, which solidified his status as a beloved character actor. He is also widely remembered for his recurring role as Mr Jonas, the Dodge City storekeeper on the long running series *Gunsmoke* from 1955 to 1974.

You look at Dabbs Greer and you instantly feel like you've known him your entire life. He's that uncle you had who ran the local hardware store or the preacher who baptized your cousin. People talk about Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart, but television was really built on the backs of guys like Dabbs Greer. He was the mortar between the bricks.

His very first television role was in 1950, playing the arch-villain Shaky on *Dick Tracy* starring Ralph Byrd. In 1951, he showed up on an episode of the popular early sci-fi series *Space Patrol*. And in the very first episode of *Adventures of Superman* back in 1952, who is the guy dangling from the blimp? Dabbs Greer! George Reeves flies in and rescues him. That set the tone.

And then *The Green Mile* in 1999. Frank Darabont casts him as the older Tom Hanks (Paul Edgecomb). He's over 80 years old, sitting in that retirement home wiping tears away at the end of the film. It's one of the most emotionally devastating scenes in 90s cinema, and it was anchored by a guy who got his start doing live radio and B-Westerns in the 1940s. That is real Hollywood royalty.

And here's something people always remember once you point it out: whenever Hollywood needed a man of the cloth, Dabbs Greer was television's official clergyman. If two iconic TV characters were walking down the aisle, Dabbs was standing at the altar! On *The Dick Van Dyke Show*, who was the Army chaplain trying to marry a limping Rob Petrie and Laura in that chaotic chapel? Dabbs Greer! Six years later on the pilot episode of *The Brady Bunch*, who married Mike and Carol Brady in that famous backyard ceremony when the dog and cat ran wild? Dabbs Greer again! And for nearly a decade on *Little House on the Prairie*, he wasn't just playing Reverend Alden—to millions of American living rooms, he *was* their small-town pastor.

But it wasn't just clergymen and storekeepers. He was cast six times as a guest star on *The Fugitive* with David Janssen—more than any other actor besides Richard Anderson, who also did six episodes. And in addition to his famous ties with Superman, Greer crossed paths with practically every major TV superhero across four decades. In 1952, he helped the Lone Ranger round up a gang of vicious killers. In 1975, he met Captain Marvel on *Shazam!*. In 1978, he had a wild run-in with the Incredible Hulk. And in 1982, he was dealing with William Katt on *The Greatest American Hero*. If someone was wearing a cape or a mask on television, chances are Dabbs Greer was right there sharing the screen with them.

Greer made four visits to Mayberry portraying four different characters, as well as two memorable meetings with *Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.*. Along the way, he showed up on the Ponderosa in eight episodes of *Bonanza*, and took two trips into Rod Serling's *The Twilight Zone* for good measure. He crossed swords with Eliot Ness on *The Untouchables*, and was cast several times on the popular courtroom drama *Perry Mason*—once as the actual murderer in 'The Case of the Prudent Prosecutor'! And he was cast ten times on *The F.B.I.* with Efrem Zimbalist Jr., as well as memorable turns on *The Mod Squad*, *Barnaby Jones*, and *Cannon*. In 1967, he even played an alien on *The Invaders* with Roy Thinnes. That truly covers the brunt of his legendary TV work.

And his feature film career was just as memorable. In 1953, he played Sergeant Shane opposite Vincent Price in *House of Wax*—the very first color 3-D movie released by a major studio, and an enormous box office smash. In 1958, he starred in *It! The Terror from Beyond Space*, which became famous as the direct film that inspired Ridley Scott's *Alien*. He also held his own in three major feature films opposite Jimmy Stewart: Billy Wilder's *The Spirit of St. Louis* in 1957 (as Goldsborough), *Shenandoah* in 1965, and *The Cheyenne Social Club* in 1970 alongside Stewart and Henry Fonda."