There are countless supporting actors. Some are off-beat and quirky, and everybody calls them “character actors.” Others may be every bit as much eye-candy as a top-billed movie star.
On the Welcome page, I called supporting players, “the diamonds at the core of the film & television world.” I could as easily have metaphorized them as “the foundation,” or “the backbone.”
If you knew Supporting TV Cast, you probably sensed that it tended to lean in toward the kind of veteran actor who strikes one’s sensibilities like a well-liked aunt or uncle you forget about until they come for a visit. (It has become something of an amusing, self-evident truth in retro fandom that you could point out any one of that kind of actor and they are sure to have appeared on one or more episodes of the 9-season stretch of the original Perry Mason series.)
Actors Under the Stars (AutS) is the offspring of Supporting TV Cast and wants to explore supporting players from a broader perspective. The range includes recurring familiar faces that limbo in under your radar from a variety of eras.
Some you have heard as the voices of popular film animations, or as the audio of commercials, whose visages just might gob smack you if I am able to connect the face to the voice.
Some may be luminaries on the stage but out of the spotlight on the screen. There may be introductions to extras who recur in backgrounds and whose own background stories are engaging. And, of course, AutS goes in-depth on some prolific supporting actors from bygone days whose legacies should never be allowed to fade.
I thought of renaming the Cast Notes/Blog, “Star Lites/Blog.” I decided the wordplay was too kitschy. Back in 2014, the government of China banned puns and play on words in journalism; supposedly, the worry was about risking, “cultural and linguistic chaos.” MY worry was that, not only was the play on starlight a little too cute, it also might carry a faint suggestion that the actors here are a diluted substitute for true stars—that they are just a “lite” version.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Enjoy AutS
~FW