Dabbs Greer: The Unsung Icon

"Hello everybody. My name is Mike Jones and welcome to Hollywood Faces. 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. Hollywood Faces 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.

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."