William Campbell

William Campbell (October 30, 1923 – April 28, 2011) was an American actor who appeared in supporting roles in major film productions, and also starred in several low-budget B-movies and horror films. Career Campbell's film career began in 1950, with a small part in the John Garfield film The Breaking Point. After several years of similar supporting performances in a number of films, including as a co-pilot in William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (1954), he won his first starring role in Cell 2455 Death Row (1955), a low-budget prison film for Columbia Pictures. He played a death row inmate, based loosely on the true story of Caryl Chessman, who staunchly proclaimed his innocence and obtained numerous reprieves over many years until finally being executed. Campbell's surprisingly powerful performance received generally good notices from critics, but it did very little for his career; his next several roles were again providing support to lead actors, including Man Without a Star (1955), Love Me Tender (1956) in which he became the first person to lip sync portions of a song onscreen (actually recorded on August 24, 1956, by the Ken Darby Trio) with Elvis Presley, and the 1958 film version of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. In 1958, Campbell co-starred with Paul Birch in Cannonball, a short-lived television series about truck drivers. After that, he worked for more years in small parts in increasingly lower grade movies. Campbell made two guest appearances on Perry Mason in 1959 and 1960. In his first appearance he played the title character and murder victim Allen Sheridan in "The Case of the Artful Dodger," then he played murderer and title character Jim Ferris in "The Case of the Ill-Fated Faker."