William Challee

William Challee was an American actor who came first to the stage, appearing on Broadway by 1926 and in early Group Theatre productions by 1931, with roles in plays including Men in White, Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! Born in Chicago, he staged a suite of Eugene O'Neill one-act plays in Harlem at the Lafayette Theatre in 1937, presented under the heading Plays of the Sea by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration. By the middle 1940s he had moved into films in California, usually in supporting parts, many of them uncredited, among them The Sea of Grass (1947). He also worked in television, in episodes of series such as The Lone Ranger, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and Laramie, and took the part of the incapacitated family patriarch in Five Easy Pieces (1970).