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| - For over five decades, veteran character actor Dave Willock could be spotted as your friendly neighbor, buddy or unassuming blue-collar worker in hundreds of assorted films--both comedy and drama. Tall and lanky, marked with a slightly long, gaunt face, flat vocal pattern and jug-like ears, he was for the most part an amiable guy who blended in unobtrusively as a benign servant: cabbie, clerk, usher, soda jerk, photographer, messenger boy, bellhop, etc. Decades later, he was handed minor but steady work via Jerry Lewis, Robert Aldrich and Walt Disney.
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| - For over five decades, veteran character actor Dave Willock could be spotted as your friendly neighbor, buddy or unassuming blue-collar worker in hundreds of assorted films--both comedy and drama. Tall and lanky, marked with a slightly long, gaunt face, flat vocal pattern and jug-like ears, he was for the most part an amiable guy who blended in unobtrusively as a benign servant: cabbie, clerk, usher, soda jerk, photographer, messenger boy, bellhop, etc. Decades later, he was handed minor but steady work via Jerry Lewis, Robert Aldrich and Walt Disney. A perennial support player, the Chicago-born Willock appeared in a number of cult sci-fi classics of the 1950s, including It Came from Outer Space (1953), Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Queen of Outer Space (1958). In later years he served as a minor foil for Jerry Lewis when the comedian went solo in such film vehicles as The Delicate Delinquent (1957), The Geisha Boy (1958), The Ladies' Man (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963), The Patsy (1964) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964). Willock was a utility player as well for director Robert Aldrich in such films as Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), The Grissom Gang (1971), and Emperor of the North (1973). His most famous Aldrich role was that of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's vaudeville father in the classic grand guignol shocker What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Disney kept him fairly busy in their TV and film features from the late 1950s into the 1970s, and he was a favorite casting choice of Jack Webb for Dragnet and Adam-12, where he'd appear as a good-natured barfly or a pharmacist. Willock was also heard but not seen in animated cartoons, notably as the narrator of Wacky Races (1968). Retired by the late 1970s, Willock passed away on November 12, 1990, of complications from a stroke in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 81.
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