Phillip Pine

Longtime character actor, born in Hanford, California, who made his stage debut in a play written in Portugese, and later worked on showboats along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. A man of seemingly chameleon-like capabilities, Pine has played henchmen and treacherous gang leaders on television and movies, and leading roles in Broadway and off-Broadway theater. In 1954, he worked on stage in See the Jaguar and The Immoralist and acted in productions that included James Dean in their casts. He played the title role in King Creole) -- later portrayed by Elvis Presley in the film version. In A Stone for Danny Fisher, a production that featured Zero Mostel, Joe De Santis, and Susan Cabot; Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the play in The New York Times wrote that Pine turned in "a good performance. He makes the character shifty and shallow, but likable, also, like a heel who means well weakly."
With very expressive eyes and a minimum of words, he can melt into a role, and make the most of only a few seconds' screen time. His feature films include William Keighley's crime thriller The Street with No Name (1948), Robert Wise's The Set Up, Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart, and William Wellman's Battleground, all made in 1949. A veteran of hundreds of television shows, from Superman ("The Case of the Talkative Dummy," "The Mystery of the Broken Statues") to The Twilight Zone to Star Trek ("The Savage Curtain"), Pine's best known film appearance was probably in Irving Lerner's 1958 thriller Murder By Contract, in which he portrayed one of a pair of hoods working with hired assassin Vince Edwards. He also directed, produced, and wrote an obscure feature film called Pot, Parent, and Police, made in 1972 for the short-lived Jerry Lewis Cinema Circuit.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide