Ron Nastie and The Final Taxi
I was floored
when I found out that character actor Charles Lane had taken the Final
Taxi this week. Not because of his death but that he had lived so long.
He as 102. He was the oldest living actor in the US. ( The oldest actor
is Dutch actor Johannes Heesters who is 103 and only did 80
productions) 
I remember seeing him as a boy and thinking he was old then.
Lane’s lean frame and stern features were familiar to millions of movie and television fans, most of whom, it is safe to say, never knew his name. He was in over 800 productions in his 60 years in show business.
Lane was born Charles Levison on Jan. 26, 1905, in San Francisco and started his work life in the insurance business. In 1928, he joined the company at the Pasadena Playhouse, which was known for training actors for the movies. If you listen to this week’s Final Taxi podcast you will hear that Kerwin Mathews was ‘discovered’ there as well.
Lane made his film debut as a hotel desk clerk in “Smart Money” (1931) with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney.
He went on to act in films such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a
newsman), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (the rent collector), “You Can’t Take
It With You” (an IRS agent), “No Time for Sergeants” (the draft board
driver) and hundreds of others in which he played shopkeepers,
professors, judges, bureaucrats, doctors, “a guy at the bar,” policemen
and salesmen. In the 1930s alone, he appeared in 161 films, sometimes
moving from set to set to deliver a few lines in each of several movies
in one day.
Starting in the early 1950s, Lane also appeared on dozens of TV shows, including “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.” Perhaps most famously, he appeared in classic episodes of “I Love Lucy,” playing several characters who all seemed to have in common a stunned if comical lack of patience for the bumbling Lucy. He said it was on this show that he perfected the crusty skinflint.
Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Lane could be seen on “Perry Mason,” “Dennis the Menace,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Bewitched,” “Get Smart,” “The Flying Nun,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Lou Grant” and many other shows. In the 1970s, he had running parts on “The Beverly Hillbillies” as Foster Phinney and in “Soap” as Judge Anthony Petrillo. In the 1960s, audiences got to know him as Homer Bedloe, a scheming trouble-shooter for the railroad in “Petticoat Junction.”
Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” said that although Lane played “a gruff, arrogant kind of guy” there and in dozens of other roles, “That was not him at all, that was a character.”
In 2005, when friends and industry admirers gathered to celebrate his 100th birthday at a TV Land special event, he accepted their plaudits from a wheelchair and declared, “If you’re interested, I’m still available.”
Oh, to have that kind of energy when I am that age and to be seen by as many people has Charles Lane has been seen by.
A person like Charles Lane is the reason I created the Final Taxi podcast.
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