Biography
Best described as a young
George Kennedy type (though he and Kennedy were contemporaries), American actor Mort Mills spent three decades playing omniprescent and menacing types. He started out in films in the early '50s, showing up briefly in such productions as
Affair in Trinidad (1952) and
Farmer Takes a Wife (1955). He also seemed to be lurking in the background, taking in the information at hand and waiting to saunter over and pounce upon someone smaller than himself (which was just about everyone). Mills' character straddled both sides of the law: He was a friendly frontier sheriff in the 1958 syndicated TV western
Man without a Gun and a less friendly police lieutenant on the 1960 network adventure weekly
Dante; conversely, he was vicious western gunslinger Trigger Mortis in the 1965 Three Stooges feature
The Outlaws is Coming. Mort Mills' most indelible screen moments occured in Hitchcock's
Psycho (1960), wherein he portrayed the suspicious highway patrolman who almost catches embezzler Janet Leigh; had he succeeded, she would have spent the night in the pokey rather than the Bates Motel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide