Lawrence Dobkin

A character actor and television director whose career spanned seven decades, Lawrence Dobkin appeared in many films and over 200 television shows.

Lawrence Dobkin, actor: born New York 20 January 1919; twice married (one son, three daughters); died Los Angeles 28 October 2002.

A character actor and television director whose career spanned seven decades, Lawrence Dobkin appeared in many films and over 200 television shows.

In his earlier career he was a prolific radio performer, and his mellifluous voice was often used for narration and voice-overs. His voice is heard narrating Delmer Daves's classic western Broken Arrow (1950) and Henry Koster's The Robe (1953) and for many years his was the voice that announced the television series The Naked City, closing the show with the statement that "there are eight million stories in the naked city, and this has been one of them". His films include Sweet Smell of Success (1956), The Defiant Ones (1958) and North by Northwest (1959).

A former child actor who started doing radio work to pay for his studies at the Yale School of Drama, Dobkin was born in New York City in 1919. He understudied Paul Lukas in the Broadway production of Lillian Hellman's anti-Fascist play Watch on the Rhine (1942) prior to serving with a radio propaganda unit of the Air Force during the Second World War. Returning to broadcasting in New York, he was one of five actors who played the famed detective Ellery Queen on radio.

Dobkin became one of the medium's stalwarts and he often acted in many series concurrently. In The Adventures of Nero Wolfe (1950-51) the eponymous orchid fancier and "gargantuan gourmet" of Rex Stout's mystery novels was played by Sidney Greenstreet, with Dobkin as Archie, his secretary with a roving eye, who would goad Wolfe into taking a case whenever their finances were low. Other radio shows included Escape (1947-54), often cited as radio's greatest adventure series, The Saint (1951-55), Gunsmoke (1952-61), and such anthologies as Lux Radio Theater. "The few of us who are left," he said recently, "keep telling each other that we never had it so good."

He moved easily into television in the Fifties, and in 1967 received an Emmy nomination as best supporting actor for his role in the "CBS Playhouse" production Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. He started directing for television in 1960, and his work in this field included the pilot show and first six episodes of The Munsters (1964).

Dobkin made his film début as an extra in Kiss of Death (1947), but had his first acting role as an Assistant District Attorney in Ida Lupino's production Not Wanted (1949). Often cast as figures of authority, his other films included 12 O'Clock High (1949, as padre of a wartime bomber unit), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Five Fingers (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956).

In Alexander Mackendrick's stunning portrait of a powerful columnist and a venal press agent, Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Dobkin portrayed a columnist with ethics whom, in a gripping scene, the press agent (Tony Curtis) attempts to bribe over his secret dalliance with a cigarette girl. While his wife studies racing form in a newspaper at her night-club table, Dobkin is given a "smear" item by Curtis to be planted in his column, but Dobkin instead refuses and confesses his "moment of weakness" to his wife. The scene is a masterclass in writing, direction and acting.

In Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1957), Dobkin is an intelligence official who discusses the plight of the hero, who has been mistaken for an agent who doesn't exist and has now become a murder suspect. "It's so horribly sad," he says drily, "why is it I feel like laughing?"

Dobkin wrote one film script, the children's film The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1976).

Tom Vallance