I was watching
Alfred Hitchcock Presents last night, and saw this actor who I have picked out of the crowd every time I've ever seen him, in movies or on TV.
Harry Townes
The sad eyed, weary looking actor appeared on TV over 200 times, and made 29 feature films. Whenever he shows up, I end up watching only him, there's just something magnetic about him that catches my eye. I know I've looked up his name several times, trying to remember 'who IS that actor?' I think my first instance of asking myself 'Who IS that?' happened during a viewing of
The Brothers Karamazov, where he managed to take my attention away from Yul Brynner for a few minutes... no small feat.
Sorry, no photos and no videos of Townes' performance were available.
My next meeting with Townes was in the Glenn Ford movie,
Heaven With a Gun, and then on an episode of
Wanted: Dead or Alive.
A southern boy from Huntsville, Alabama, he went into acting right off, getting experience in drama club presentations during his college tenure at University of Alabama and at Columbia University.
(forgive the logo printed across the front of the picture)
He seems to have had little trouble landing Broadway and stage roles immediately, playing Captain Tim in an early revival of
Tobacco Road, and also was the replacement Og in the original run of
Finian's Rainbow. He toured with the show for two years, going to London to play the part there as well. Not sure if that means he understudied David Wayne? it seems a likely fit though.
Townes took 4 years off just before Finian to fight in WWII as a member of the Army Air Corps. In 1946, he went right back into acting, and soon went to Hollywood, appearing in 29 movies during the course of his career.
In the fifties and sixties Harry Townes became one of the most recognizable faces on TV appearing on countless shows, most notably
Perry Mason, on which he appeared 5 times, and The Fugitive, which he also appeared in 5 times.
He took roles in everything from westerns to science fiction:
His most popular appearance on TV was on
The Incredible Hulk, in an episode entitled,
The First. Townes played an earlier victim of 'hulk' like symptoms. The Hulk story was very similar to a
Twilight Zone episode he did called
The Four of Us Are Dying, in which a man is able to change his face in order to run away with the woman he loved. In both shows, the man is attacked by her other suitor, and in fleeing changes into another form. Ironically, he is shot escaping, because he's 'different'.
In the 1970's, Townes quit acting, moved away from Beverly Hills, put himself through seminary and was ordained as an Episcopal priest. He first served at the Church of the Bells in Palm Springs, CA. then moved back to Huntsville, pastoring there until his death in 2001.
I guess we're never entirely happy with what we do; we would like to do better. I feel I was lucky to get the work that I did. You always feel thankful because there are so many actors for so few jobs that it seems God is being good to you when you get a job. Of course, I would have loved to have done better, we all would. But we always think we can do it better in one more take. On the whole, I'm satisfied, though. As long as the audience was satisfied, then I'm satisfied.
~ Harry Townes