Roger Perry

Fresh-faced, blue-eyed all-American looking Roger Perry was discovered by Lucille Ball and signed as a Desilu contract player, beginning his screen career in anthology television. An early chance for stardom came his way as the junior half of a father-and-son lawyer firm (the other half of the duo was played by Pat O'Brien) in Harrigan and Son (1960). Prior to his acting career in the early 50s, Perry had served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. Perry was a Desilu player, having been discovered by Lucille Ball and signed as a Desilu contract player in 1959. He popped up in diverse genres throughout the 1960s. He notably had a guest role as the involuntarily time-travelling Air Force pilot John Christopher in Tomorrow Is Yesterday (1967). His roles could occasionally be shifty types, dopers, or nervous weaklings but, more often than not, as down-to-earth cops, doctors, or middle-echelon military types. No stranger to science fiction and horror, his better-known roles included a devious alien masquerading as a magazine writer in The Prophet (1967) and a sympathetic physician in Count Yorga, Vampire (1970). The doctor tag stuck and Perry went on to play medicos in a couple of camp cult favorites: The Return of Count Yorga (1971) (in which his character hurls a vampire off a balcony to his doom) and The Thing with Two Heads (1972) (as a collaborator of the demented scientist in residence, played tongue-in-cheek by Ray Milland). He also enjoyed frequent guest spots on crime time TV (notably Ironside (1967) and The F.B.I. (1965)) and in the soap opera Falcon Crest (1981). Perry sidelined as a composer and songwriter for Los Angeles theatre productions, including a mid-1980s musical version of George Bernard Shaw's 'You Never Can Tell', which featured his future wife, Joyce Bulifant.