Harry Lauter

Herman Arthur Lauter, known as Harry Lauter (June 19, 1914 – October 30, 1990), was an American character actor originally from White Plains, New York.

He came to be a familiar presence in low-budget films, serials (where he was often cast because of his facial resemblance to stuntman Tom Steele, who would double him), and television programs in the 1950s, though he only once really came close to a stardom, as Clay Morgan, one of the leads in the series Tales of the Texas Rangers, which aired from 1955 to 1958. He starred in fifty-two episodes.

Lauter also made appearances on many television programs, particularly westerns: The Gene Autry Show (sixteen episodes), Annie Oakley (12 episodes), The Lone Ranger and The Range Rider (eleven episodes each), Gunsmoke and Rawhide (ten episodes each), Death Valley Days and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (seven episodes each), Laramie and Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater (six episodes each), The Virginian and State Trooper (five times each), and Cheyenne, Bonanza, and Maverick (three episodes each). In 1963 he made a guest appearance on Perry Mason in "The Case of the Potted Planter." His last appearance was in 1979 as Marshal Charlie Benton in James Arness's How the West Was Won.

Most of his career was spent as a serviceable second lead or heavy, though he continued to play bit parts in larger pictures, including an uncredited part as a plain-clothes policeman in the 1949 crime drama, White Heat which starred James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien. He also had an uncredited, unspoken role in the 1963 comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as a police dispatcher.

The son of an artist, he devoted much of his energy late in his life to his own painting and the operation of an art gallery. Lauter died in 1990 in Ojai in Ventura County, California. His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.