The ongoing hazard of Celebrating the Living, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, is discovering that people were still alive only when they’ve died. It’s a little disheartening. Sometimes, though, there would be no reason whatsoever to assume that the person is alive. Someone with seventy movie credits, all but eleven of which were from before 1960? Yes, all right, he switched to TV for the most part and stayed active on TV until 1991. But still. And then for the person to die of lung cancer at the age of ninety-six, instead of the slightly more expected “died of being really old”? Why would you think of that person?

I don’t, in all honesty, know why William Phipps was cast as Prince Charming in Disney’s 1950 Cinderella. He’d only done ten movies at that point, and I guess Disney did in those days prefer the relatively obscure. I have actually seen two of those movies—Crossfire and They Live by Night—and he certainly couldn’t be said to star in any of them. (He’s higher billed in They Live by Night, even though his character doesn’t have a name.) He didn’t much star in his movies to come, either, but he seems to have had a solid, decades-long career as a character actor.

He was uncredited a lot, in his movies. On TV, he spent sixteen episodes as Curly Bill Brocius on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, and that’s the longest he spent on any show. Arguably his best-known role, then, is the one where you didn’t see his face, the one where he was just kind of there to move the plot further. I mean, I don’t remember the ’53 War of the Worlds enough to be sure, but since he’s ninth-billed, after Paul Frees, I’m willing to bet he isn’t exactly a driving force of the story.

On the other hand, Hollywood runs on people like that more than it runs on stars. Yes, the ’53 Julius Caesar required Marlon Brando and James Mason and Greer Garson and so forth, but even in Shakespeare’s day, you still needed Servant to Antony in there somewhere, even if you got away without all those Citizens of Rome that fill out the entire bottom half of the cast. The Rockford Files needs Jim and Rocky, but every episode has a lot of other characters to cast, and if everyone were stars, who would play Sergeant?

Okay. I don’t really have a lot to say about William Phipps himself other than that he was incredibly prolific and that there was more to Prince Charming than he usually gets given credit for. I feel as though this is often the case with Disney characters. There’s not a lot to the character in the fairy tale, because of course there isn’t, but Phipps gave as much as he could to a character that wasn’t incredibly complicated on the page.