Matt Willis -- who was known on-stage as Marion Willis -- was a successful general-purpose actor who appeared in a dozen Broadway productions, including Come Angel Band, How Beautiful With Shoes, Sweet River, Stork Mad, The Burning Deck, and Tobacco Road (as Lov Bensey), and over 60 feature films in the period from 1941 through 1952. He started out in vaudeville, and initially came to notice as a blackface comedian while a member of Hank White's Minstrels, before moving into legitimate theater in the mid-'30s. His screen career mostly consisted of small parts -- during World War II, he portrayed a succession of taciturn sergeants in single scenes -- though he occasionally rose to key supporting roles. The best-known movie in which Willis appeared was Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942); he played a sheriff's deputy. His credits also included Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun (1945), Frank Borzage's Stage Door Canteen (1943), and Walt Disney's production of So Dear to My Heart (1949), but his best role was in a decidedly lower-budgeted B-feature, Columbia's The Return of the Vampire (1943), in which he played Andreas, the tormented werewolf under the spell of the vampire played by Bela Lugosi. Surprisingly, given the deep, gravel-textured voice that he often displayed, Willis also sang in at least one production, Swingtime Johnny. He passed away in at age 75.
by Bruce Eder
biography
