John Kellogg

Give credit to character actors--the best manage to keep themselves busy and nurture long, productive careers. Case in point: John Kellogg. After getting a quick start in the theater as a young man in the mid-to-late 1930s, he heard the call of Hollywood and leaped to film. His first role in the medium was as Tommy Lee in the 1940 farm-girl-in-the-big-city drama "High School." It was to be the first of nearly 70 film appearances for the dependable Kellogg. Since he cut his teeth in movies during World War II, he inevitably ended up in numerous war features. Among these were "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944), in which he appeared briefly as a transport pilot, and the Italy-set "A Walk in the Sun" (1945), starring Dana Andrews. Kellogg apparently had a lot of energy, because in addition to those many film roles he appeared quite often on TV series. He started from the dawn of that medium with a guest appearance in "The Lone Ranger" (1949). From then, he was constantly on the box. Most of this work was guest-star turns on shows like "Adventures of Superman" (1952), but he did have the occasional regular role--he was bad guy Jack Chandler on the small-town soap opera "Peyton Place" (1966), for example. Working fairly late into his life, Kellogg was still spry when he appeared in a recurring role as an ill-fated patient in the medical drama "St. Elsewhere" in 1987.