Murray Alper

Murray Alper (January 11, 1904 – November 16, 1984) was an American actor born in New York City. His career spanned stage, film, and television, with Broadway appearances from 1927 to 1940 and screen work extending from the 1930s through the late 1960s.

Alper's stage career included productions such as Rendezvous, Every Man for Himself, The Spider, Broadway Boy, The Wild Man of Borneo, This is New York, and Sailor Beware. His first known screen credit, The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), was drawn from a role he had already performed on Broadway in 1927 and 1928.

Over the course of his film and television career, Alper accumulated more than 200 credits, the majority of them uncredited. He became closely associated with the role of the talkative taxi driver, a character he portrayed at least 20 times across various productions. Among the most prominent of these appearances was his role in The Maltese Falcon (1941), in which he played a friendly cabbie who drives Sam Spade — portrayed by Humphrey Bogart — on a mid-film wild goose chase. He reprised variations of the cabbie character in The Big Broadcast of 1937, Lady in the Dark, Angel on My Shoulder, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941).

Alper worked with Hitchcock on three additional films: Saboteur (1942) and Strangers on a Train (1951). He had been cast in the role of Gus Smith in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1943), which would have been his largest screen role, but an illness immediately before shooting began in August of that year led to his replacement by William Bendix.

Alper also appeared in comedy productions throughout his career, including the Three Stooges films Tricky Dicks (1953) and The Outlaws Is Coming (1965). He played the judo instructor in Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963).