Once again, we are in the Realm Of People Without Wikipedia Pages. Oh, there are guys named Luis Delgado with Wikipedia pages. Several of them, in fact. Four footballers from four different countries (including Angola!), a musician, and a tennis player. There are a couple of webpages around, mostly repeating the information on his IMDb page. And there’s a tribute on The Official James Garner Fan Page on Facebook which actually has some fairly useful information which I’m going to go ahead and assume to be accurate because it’s information, and I need some of that. But not a lot of people are talking about Luis Delgado.
To be fair, he got his big break in the industry through nepotism. His sister was actress Adele Mara, who we’ll get to. She, in turn, was married to Roy Huggins for nearly fifty years. Huggins was a writer and creator in Hollywood. Among his creations was Maverick. He hired his brother-in-law as a stand-in for star James Garner. Reading between the lines, the pair seem to have spent time on set talking; what’s certainly true is that they got to be good friends. Best friends, according to that Facebook page. And if Huggins hired Delgado out of nepotism, well, you could in Hollywood do a lot worse than to befriend James Garner.
It is simply a fact that Garner liked working with the same people over and over again. He’s not the only one. You watch people’s Oscar reels when they work behind-the-scenes, half of them are wearing Jurassic Park hats and similar. If you know the people do good work, you keep them around. And while, sure, Delgado was initially there to look enough like James Garner to stand in for him, when The Rockford Files came around, he actually got a recurring character with a name and everything. Two of them, technically.
On Rockford, he played Officer Billings. Most of the time, he was just “Officer Billings,” though in season three, he is Todd Billings and Jack Billings, depending on which episode you’re watching. He was also assorted minor characters in the episodes leading up to that, but starting then, he played the same role for dozens of episodes. It’s not a flashy role. Billings doesn’t get car chases or shootouts. He’s mostly there to do the grunt work for Dennis. He keeps things running.
I suspect his IMDb page is incomplete. He’s listed as “additional crew” a mere ten times, all as either stand-in or assistant to James Garner. That’s not even all the Rockford movies he was alive to be involved in. Come to that, I’m pretty sure he acted in at least one of the movies, though you’ll understand that I have no interest in rewatching to find out, and he’s not listed as being in those, either. But over the decades of his career, if you saw James Garner, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Luis Delgado was around there somewhere. Perhaps even where you thought you were seeing James Garner.
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