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Arthur Malet

Arthur Malet built a screen career around character parts that could be modest in size yet sharply defined. Born in Lee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire, on 24 September 1927, the British actor emigrated to the United States in the 1950s, adopted Arthur as his forename and began acting onstage. He won two Drama Desk Awards in 1957 before coming to wider attention through film work in the 1960s. Malet often played men considerably older than he was, a quality put to memorable use when he appeared as Mr. Dawes, Jr. in Mary Poppins. His roles could carry him into very different corners of the movies: he played undertaker Ted Ulam in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, a village elder in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein and the graveyard keeper in John Carpenter’s Halloween. These were the kinds of supporting appearances that made him a familiar presence without tying him to one genre. Television offered an equally varied run of parts. Malet appeared in The Donna Reed Show, The Rifleman, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Gunsmoke, Bewitched, Wonder Woman and Dallas. He was murder victim Ralph Day in a 1965 episode of Perry Mason, played a vagrant on The Andy Griffith Show and later appeared as Joe Fenwick in the Columbo episode Dagger of the Mind. He also held a regular role in the short-lived 1983 television adaptation of Casablanca. His voice work added another dimension to that career. Malet voiced Mr. Ages in The Secret of NIMH and returned to the role for its 1998 sequel, while also contributing to The Black Cauldron and Anastasia. Later live-action roles included Tootles in Hook, Owen Owens in Toys and Charles Randolph in A Little Princess. Across stage, film, television and animation, Malet found a durable place as a character actor able to fit naturally into mysteries, comedies, fantasies and family films. He died in 2013.