Mercer McLeod on AllMovie

Mercer McLeod was a gifted character actor whose career carried him from the English stage to radio in Canada and the United States, and to Broadway and television, with room for one feature film in the midst of it all. Born in Canada, he moved to England as a boy and grew up in Yorkshire. He was a member of the Frank Benson Shakespeare Company and later joined the Ben Greet Players (one of the last great British stock companies, whence Dame Sybil Thorndike, among many others, first started). McLeod first toured the United States with Sir Philip Greet in a production of Hamlet, and the Bernard Shaw Players, with which he toured England, South America, and the Far East. McLeod returned to Canada after a particularly long and exhausting tour and decided to try his hand at radio, initially as a producer. He later became a radio actor and proved so adept -- writing and acting all of the male parts in a very popular piece, "The Man With the Story" -- that he found himself in demand from radio producers in the United States. It was a short jump to television, and McLeod appeared regularly on such early dramatic anthology series as Ford Theater, Kraft Television Theater, and Pulitzer Prize Playhouse. His Broadway debut came in 1951, in The Green Bay Tree. His other Broadway credits included Deadfall, starring Joanne Dru and John Ireland and directed by Hollywood blacklistee Michael Gordon. McLeod could play a wide range of roles, from crafty, clever types to dithering, nervous individuals -- often with a comic edge -- to great effect. His sole feature-film appearance, amid dozens of television performances and hundreds of radio broadcasts, was in the 1957 Universal delinquency drama The Violators, as the judge. His last major television appearance was as a bystander in a 1963 broadcast version of Shaw's Pygmalion.