Ray Teal(1902-1976)
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Most familiar to TV audiences as no-nonsense Sheriff Roy Coffee on the
long-running western series
Bonanza (1959), Ray Teal was one of
the most versatile character actors in the business. In his almost
40-year career he played everything from cops to gunfighters to
sheriffs to gangsters to a judge at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. He
could play a kindly grandfather in one film and a heartless, sadistic
killer in the next, and be equally believable in both roles. A native
of Grand Rapids, Michigan, he was a musician who worked his way through
college playing the sax in local bands. At UCLA in the 1920s he formed
his own band and led it until 1936. He appeared in several films in
minor bit parts, and it wasn't until 1938 that he had a somewhat more
substantial part, in
Western Jamboree (1938). The
next year he had a bigger part in the splashy
Spencer Tracy adventure
Northwest Passage (1940) as one
of Rogers' Rangers. He appeared in serials, westerns, crime dramas,
costume epics (he even appeared as Little John in
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946)!),
war pictures, had a small but memorable part as an anti-Semitic
blowhard who gets knocked into a store display by
Dana Andrews in
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
and a bigger and more memorable part as one of
Spencer Tracy's fellow judges in
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
He also made many appearances on TV, in everything from
The Lone Ranger (1949) to
Green Acres (1965). He died of
natural causes in 1976.
