Mr. Whit Bissell (1909–96) the LATE GREAT character actor...

Often a welcomed performer:

HE WALKED BY NIGHT
THE LOST CONTINENT
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
ELMER GANTRY
HUD
SEVEN DAYS IN MAY 

Until I learned his name a while back, he was "the guy from The Time Tunnel".

A tribute

Ha he has a line in Teenage Frankenstein
when he kills his wife and then has to explain how she just vanished.

"Perfidy, thy name is woman."

...I always got him and Hurd Hatfield mixed up...

Whit = I was a Teenage Frankenstein

Hurd = The Portrait of Dorian Gray

Wonderful actor, Whit Bissell. He labored mostly in obscurity, a familiar face and voice, yet a virtual no-name actor for so many years. I've always liked him. He's up there in my book: one of the great American archetypes of middle to late 20th century films and television. He had a genteel, sympathetic presence, and yet he could turn bad. Seldom was he cast as a wholly unsympathetic character. There was the air of an educator about him. Or maybe educated man is the better way to put it.

He was always refined and soft-spoken. There were affinities with similar actors, such as Hugh Marlowe, whom I used to actually confuse with Bissell when I was growing up. Bissell's mannerisms were upscale. He could have (and I believe many times did) played a patrician. Yet he really didn't possess the imperiousness, the oftentimes haughtiness of the likes of, say, John Hoyt. I wasn't surprised to learn that his father was a prominent New York surgeon, as Mr. Bissell could easily adopt the air of a medical man.

I always got the impression that he was a class act in his personal life; that his gentlemanly qualities were real; and that when he played men of professional integrity that this was very close to the way the man was himself in his personal life. As an actor, projecting authority came easily to Whit Bissell, or so it seems to me. It's like he was predestined to play men of authority. That he was often capable, as an actor, of playing men who abused their authority showed his professionalism and, especially, when playing a character not playing with a full deck. his versatility as well. That he was also capable of playing men who were abject cowards shows what a fine actor Whit Bissell really was.