Ray B. Collins

Ray Bidwell Collins was an American character actor born on December 10, 1889, in Sacramento, California, to Lillie Bidwell and William Calderwood Collins. His father worked as a newspaper reporter and dramatic editor at The Sacramento Bee, and his mother was a niece of John Bidwell, a pioneer and statesman who played a significant role in the development of the Sacramento Valley during the nineteenth century. Collins was drawn to acting as a boy after watching his uncle, Ulric Collins, perform the role of Dave Bartlett in the Broadway production of Way Down East. He began staging informal productions with neighborhood children and made his professional debut at age thirteen at the Liberty Playhouse in Oakland.

His early career was marked by extraordinary productivity. Between the ages of seventeen and thirty, Collins was reportedly unemployed as an actor for a total of only five weeks. In December 1912, he and his first wife, Margaret Marriott, performed together as a vaudeville team at the Alhambra Theatre in Seattle. By July 1914, the couple and their young son, Junius, had relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Collins continued acting. In 1922, he joined Vancouver's Popular Players, a stock company that performed at the original Orpheum Theatre, and he subsequently operated his own stock company for five years at the Empress Theatre in Vancouver before making his way to New York.

Collins reached Broadway in 1924, the same year his marriage to Marriott ended in divorce. That year he opened in Conscience, his verified Broadway credit, and went on to appear regularly in Broadway productions and other theatrical engagements until the onset of the Great Depression. In 1926, he married Joan Uron. Over the course of his stage career, Collins accumulated approximately 900 roles in the legitimate theatre.

When the Depression curtailed theatrical work, Collins shifted his focus to radio, where he took on as many as eighteen broadcasts per week and sometimes worked sixteen hours a day. He also appeared in short films beginning in 1930, including entries in the Vitaphone Varieties series based on Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories. His radio career gained considerable distinction when, in 1934, he began a long professional association with Orson Welles. The two met when Welles joined the repertory cast of The American School of the Air. By 1935, both Collins and Welles had become part of the elite acting corps behind the news dramatization series The March of Time, a group that also included Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, and Paul Stewart. Collins appeared on the historical drama series Cavalcade of America for six years and collaborated with Welles on a serial adaptation of Les Misérables in 1937 and on The Shadow from 1937 to 1938.

Collins became a member of the repertory company for Welles's CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 and its sponsored successor, The Campbell Playhouse, which ran from 1938 to 1940. During those broadcasts he took on numerous roles in literary adaptations, among them Squire Livesey in Treasure Island, Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes, and Mr. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. His most widely noted contribution to the series came in the celebrated 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, in which he played three roles, most prominently a rooftop newscaster describing the destruction of New York. He also originated the title role in the popular radio series Crime Doctor.

Collins made his feature-film debut alongside other Mercury Theatre players in Citizen Kane in 1941, portraying ruthless political boss Jim W. Gettys. That same year he appeared in Welles's original Broadway production of Native Son. In 1942, he played a principal role in Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, and continued his radio work with Welles on the wartime series Ceiling Unlimited and Hello Americans, as well as the variety program The Orson Welles Almanac in 1944.

Having returned to California, Collins went on to appear in more than seventy-five motion pictures. His film credits included Leave Her to Heaven in 1945, The Best Years of Our Lives and Crack-Up in 1946, A Double Life in 1947, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer in 1947, The Man from Colorado in 1948, two entries in the Ma and Pa Kettle series, the 1953 version of The Desert Song in which he played Kathryn Grayson's father, and a supporting role in Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958.

On television, Collins was a series regular on The Halls of Ivy from 1954 to 1955, starring Ronald Colman. In 1955 he appeared as Judge Harper in a television adaptation of Miracle on 34th Street, featuring Thomas Mitchell, Teresa Wright, and MacDonald Carey. In 1957, Collins joined the cast of the CBS series Perry Mason, where he became widely recognized for his recurring role as Los Angeles homicide detective Lieutenant Arthur Tragg. He filmed his final episode of the series, The Case of the Capering Camera, in October 1963; it aired on January 16, 1964. Although Collins did not return to the production, his name continued to appear in the opening title sequence through the show's eighth season, which concluded in May 1965, a decision made by executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson, who knew Collins watched the program each week.

By 1960, Collins's health had begun to deteriorate, and difficulties with memorization eventually brought his career to a close. He died of emphysema on July 11, 1965, at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, at the age of seventy-five. Masonic funeral services were held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills.