Thomas Hill

Thomas Hill was an American character actor and stage director who was born in India in 1927 and moved to Indiana as a teenager. He began his stage career in the early 1950s, working on Broadway and in television, and over four decades took close to three hundred roles at theaters around the country, among them the Cleveland Playhouse, the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Public Theatre. He directed hundreds of productions, helped found the American Theatre Company in Portland, Oregon, and later set up The Storefront Theatre there. His first film part came in The Slender Thread (1965), followed by The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Firefox (1982) and The NeverEnding Story (1984), in which he played the bookseller Mr. Coreander. He repeated that role in its first sequel. On television he was Jim Dixon in Newhart and King Baaldorf in Wizards and Warriors, and he played Father Andrew Doyle in V: The Final Battle. He died in 2009.