Ian Wolfe

Ian Marcus Wolfe (November 4, 1896 – January 23, 1992)

Wolfe made his film debut in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934). He appeared in many films, including Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Saboteur (1942), Julius Caesar (1953), Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971). Although he was American by birth, his experience in the theatre gave him precise diction, and he was often cast as Englishmen on screen, including a fictional commissioner of Scotland Yard in the final film in the 1939–1946 Sherlock Holmes film series, Dressed to Kill (1946). He also appeared in three other films in the series, as an American antiques dealer in Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943), as a butler in The Scarlet Claw (1944), and as an art dealer in The Pearl of Death (1944). He played Carter, Sir Wilfrid Robarts's clerk and office manager in Witness for the Prosecution (1957).

Wolfe played a crooked small-town doctor in "Six Gun's Legacy", an episode from the first (1949) season of The Lone Ranger. Wolfe appeared in the 1966 Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Midnight Howler" as Abel Jackson. In 1966, he portrayed the new Rev. Leighton on The Andy Griffith Show ("Aunt Bee's Crowning Glory", broadcast October 10, 1966). He also appeared in two episodes of the original Star Trek television series: "Bread and Circuses" (1968) as Septimus, and "All Our Yesterdays" (1969) as Mr. Atoz. He guest-starred in a 1977 episode of the ABC crime drama The Feather and Father Gang, and portrayed the wizard Traquill in the series Wizards and Warriors (1983). In 1982, Wolfe had a small recurring role on the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati as Hirsch, the sarcastic, irreverent butler to WKRP owner Lillian Carlson.

Central to Wolfe's appeal as a character actor was that, until he reached actual old age, he always looked considerably older than he really was. In the film Mad Love (1935), he played Colin Clive's stepfather, yet he was only four years older than Clive. In the film Houdini (1953), he warned the magician to avoid occult matters, telling him to "take the advice of an old man". He appeared in movies for another 37 years; his last film credit was for Dick Tracy (1990).

Personal life and death During World War I, Wolfe served in the United States Army as a volunteer medical specialist. He became a sergeant.