One of these days, I will do the research necessary to really discuss the concept of Standard TV Career by decade. It’s probably going to be another one of those statistical analysis deep-dives—shows that ran for a long time with a lot of new actors on every episode that produced a lot of familiar people and maybe a handful of standouts but mostly people who went from one show to another without doing anything hugely noteworthy in any of them. Today is not that day. However, when I do that, it will become obvious that Robert Quarry did a bunch of those shows in more than one decade.

He graduated from high school at age fourteen and went directly into acting. Apparently, he was a regular on the Doctor Christian radio show, starring Absolutely On The Calendar Now Jean Hersholt. He was one of the many people whose World War II service included acting. He enlisted in 1943—at age eighteen, after four years of career. After the war, he went back to acting, now on TV. (He is listed as “uncredited” in Shadow of a Doubt, but it seems uncertain if he was actually in it or not.) After fifteen years of TV, he started doing silly horror movies, which apparently involved starting a rivalry with Vincent Price.

So far, so typical. An MST3K appearance here, a RiffTrax movie there. Lots of TV shows, even including ones you’d actually remember him from if you know the episode. In this, Robert Quarry is no different from dozens, if not hundreds, of actors working at the time. Maybe more bickering with Vincent Price than average, inasmuch as Vincent Price literally told him he couldn’t act, but still. Perfectly normal stuff that is often very hard for me to get five paragraphs about, the bottom standard for appearing in this column.

One of the things I did find interesting, though, is that Quarry was apparently a very smart man who decided that what he wanted to do with his life was act. Honestly, I respect that; there’s a certain attitude that you “owe” people certain things with your intelligence. Now, this isn’t the “why turn people into dinosaurs instead of cure cancer?” thing. This is “why provide people entertainment while doing something you love instead of cure cancer?” Smart people aren’t allowed to have the same dreams as everyone else, it seems, and are expected to only have smart people dreams. And if Robert Quarry wanted to run around in bad vampire makeup instead, more power to him.

I mean, I’m sure he wished he could’ve been in better movies. I don’t know; maybe Vincent Price was right, and he couldn’t be in better things because he himself wasn’t better. I don’t think I’ve seen enough of his stuff to have an opinion on that. It doesn’t really matter. The industry needs mediocre actors who can fill the part of “intern” on a random episode of Lux Video Theatre just as much as it needed Raymond Burr or James Garner in the lead roles of Perry Mason and The Rockford Files, both shows Quarry did more than once.

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