Meg Wyllie

Meg Wyllie’s most famous role is one where she’s voiced by someone else and is about ninety percent unrecognizable, at least to me. And I’ve actually seen her in a surprising number of things. That said, if you know her from anywhere, it’s most likely to be from the first pilot of Star Trek, later reworked into the episode “The Cage.” She’s not even credited, and because of her last name she’s the absolute last person on the IMDb page for the episode. However, as The Keeper, she’s kind of important to the whole thing and it’s almost a crime how bad her Memory Alpha page is. Someone needs to get on that.

Frankly, there’s also a huge gap on Wyllie’s Wikipedia page that I want filled in. She was born in Honolulu in 1917, because her father was an engineer on sugar plantations. She then grew up in the Philippines, and she moved to New York “in the 1940s.” Which is a lot of different situations in which she could’ve moved away from the Philippines. I don’t know which one it was, but how she spent World War II as a young adult is a thing I now very much want to know. But piecing things together suggests she left before the war, because she’s also listed as having acted in two Pasadena Playhouse productions in 1940 and 1941.

The details about her Pasadena Playhouse history are confused, and honestly I’d like that sorted a bit better, too. But anyway she also acted on Broadway in the early days of her career. Her television career started with a 1952 episode of Mr. Peepers, but her focus seems to have shifted to the screen instead of the stage starting in 1958 with an appearance on M Squad. From there, she did multiple episodes of TV shows every year until 1977; after an episode of what else but The Love Boat she slowed down a bit. But only a bit.

Oh, she also did movies. Among others, she played the love interest’s grandmother in The Last Starfighter. So sure, her first movie was 1961’s The Flight That Disappeared, which appears to be some alien-themed horror movie if I’m reading things correctly. She also plays such a minor role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie that I’m only somewhat sure I know which character she is and I’ve seen that movie a lot. (Though not recently.) And she has the small and not actually important role of Mrs. Gannon in the Aykroyd/Hanks Dragnet, so she got to be married to Harry Morgan one time.

But you know what, possibly the best role she did that I’ve seen is on Perry Mason. She did a lot of Perry Mason, because those were the days when no one cared if you played eight different characters on a single TV show. She’s Ninevah Stone on “The Case of the Nebulous Nephew,” which might well be one of my favourite episodes because of its reveal. She’s so wacky and so adorable on the episode as the dotty old bat, which is one of my favourite stock characters anyway. Yeah, yeah, Star Trek is the historic bit. But don’t sleep on that Perry Mason.