Charles Lane, the anonymous yet highly familiar character actor who specialized in playing humorous cranks in hundreds of film and television roles stretching back to the early 1930s, has died. He was 102.
Lane died Monday night at his home in Brentwood, according to his son, Tom.
Though his name was not known to most, his sharply featured face and lanky presence were recognizable to generations of moviegoers as the man who suffered fools badly in such films as "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (a newsman), "It's a Wonderful Life" (the rent collector), "You Can't Take It With You" (an IRS agent), "No Time for Sergeants" (the draft board driver) and multitudes of others in which he played shopkeepers, professors, judges, bureaucrats, doctors, "a guy at the bar," policemen and salesmen.
In the 1930s alone, he appeared in 161 films, sometimes moving from set to set to deliver a few lines in each of several movies in one day.
"And I was being paid $35 a day," Lane told Associated Press writer Bob Thomas in an interview just before his 100th birthday. "When the Screen Actors Guild was being organized, I was one of the first to join."
Starting in the early 1950s, Lane was also on dozens of TV programs, including "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show." Perhaps most famously, he appeared in classic episodes of "I Love Lucy," playing several characters who all seemed to have in common a stunned if comical lack of patience with the bumbling Lucy. He said it was on this show that he perfected the crusty skinflint role.
"They were all good parts, but they were jerks," he told The Times in 1980 of his characters on "I Love Lucy." "If you have a type established, though, and you're any good, it can mean considerable work for you."
And work he got. Throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Lane could be seen on "Perry Mason," "Dennis the Menace," "The Twilight Zone," "Bewitched," "Get Smart," "The Flying Nun," "The Andy Griffith Show," "Lou Grant" and many other shows.
In the '60s, audiences got to know him as Homer Bedloe, a scheming trouble-shooter for the railroad on "Petticoat Junction." In the '70s, he had running parts on "The Beverly Hillbillies" as Foster Phinney and on "Soap" as Judge Anthony Petrillo.
Max Baer Jr., who was Jethro on "The Beverly Hillbillies," said that although Lane played "a gruff, arrogant kind of guy" there and in dozens of other roles, "that was not him at all; that was a character.
