There are some characters on TV and in movies that I’m thrilled to see whenever they appear. Not the stars, mind you, though I've nothing against star power, per se. As Peter Bogdonavich once said (and I’m paraphrasing) it’s the reverberations emanating from stars that draw us into their orbit.
However I'm thinking now of the characters and actors that you don’t see, or barely see. One such character for me is actor Lee Miller (not Jonny Lee Miller from Trainspotting, the other one), who appeared for many years on the original Perry Mason TV show.
He was always with Lt. Tragg, or Lts. Anderson or Drumm, a plainclothes cop who almost always wore a hat and was forever in the background, or off to the side. He had few lines and it’s difficult to get a good look at him because he's usually standing in the doorway, seen in profile or a noir-ish figure in the margins of a scene. On the rare occasions when he does have a line of dialog, his voice rings clearly and deliberately, and the one time I ever remember seeing him on the stand as a witness, he was most engaging.
Why I find him so fascinating, I don’t know. Unless it’s simply that writer's tendency to wonder about people, to imagine what their lives must be like in their off-time. Does Sergeant Brice go to bars after hours? Have a wife and kids? Watch baseball on TV? Have some off-the-wall fetish that would shock his colleagues in the department? Judging from the spark in his eye, he could easily have a secret life. Maybe he dates a glamorous chanteuse from a swanky nightclub downtown. Still, even when he’s told to go clear the hallway or retrieve what could be a piece of evidence, like a glove or a broken piece of glass or a handkerchief, he sets off with purpose and conviction. He’s a guy some might call a typical flatfoot, and it would bounce off without leaving a trace, because his unswerving sense of duty trumps such petty name calling.
According to imdb.com, Miller was Raymond Burr's stand-in for many years. His presence on the show goes beyond his performance onscreen. Even if he was in the margins, he stood in the star's space behind the scenes, so perhaps the reverberations from Burr's steady and compelling portrayal of the world's greatest (fictional) lawyer accompanied Miller to his marks in the edges.
