Mort Mills


Mort Mills was an American film and television actor who had roles in over 200 movies and television episodes. He was often the town lawman or the local bad guy in many popular westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1957–1959 he had a recurring co-starring role as Marshal Frank Tallman in Man Without a Gun. Other recurring roles were as Sergeant Ben Landro in the Perry Mason series and Sheriff Fred Madden in The Big Valley. In 1958, he guest starred as a particularly greedy bounty hunter who clashes with Steve McQueen's character of Josh Randall in the CBS western series, .

Biography

During World War II Mills served in the 3rd Marine Parachute Battalion in the Pacific.
Though Mills did much television work, he also found regular work in motion pictures. He is probably best known as the suspicious highway patrolman who follows Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho. A few years later, he worked again with Hitchcock, playing a spy in East Germany under the cover of being a farmer in Torn Curtain. Mills also appeared with Charlton Heston in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil.
In 1955, he appeared as Samuel Mason on ABC's Disneyland miniseries Davy Crockett, starring Fess Parker. From 1957–1959, Mills co-starred with Rex Reason in the syndicated western series Man Without a Gun. He portrayed Marshal Frank Tallman. Reason played his friend, Adam MacLean, editor of the Yellowstone Sentinel newspaper. In 1961 he appeared as Jack Saunders in the TV western Lawman in the episode titled "Owny O'Reilly." In the 1965 Three Stooges film, The Outlaws Is Coming, Mills played Trigger Mortis.
Mills was a regular as police Lieutenant Bob Malone in Howard Duff's NBC-Four Star Television series, Dante, set at a San Francisco, California, nightclub called "Dante's Inferno". He appeared in eight episodes of Perry Mason, seven of them as Police Sgt. Ben Landro between 1961 and 1965.
His cousin, Mary Treen, was a film actress.

Acting roles

Starring in his own TV series