Paul Fix

There are certain movies that have a cultural weight beyond being actually seen by people. Probably far more people have heard of the infamous Night of the Lepus than have seen it. Certainly I have not. However, it is famous for two things—it’s got giant killer bunnies and it’s got DeForest Kelley. If you don’t know anything else about it—and I don’t—you know those two things. What’s interesting, though, is that it also features Paul Fix. Fix, as we’ll see, had quite the career stretching over more than half a century. But the reason he’s specifically relevant here is that he was the Enterprise doctor in the second Star Trek pilot.

Now, you may not have remembered that detail about Fix. But you’ve definitely seen him somewhere. He was part of John Ford’s stable of actors, and while he wasn’t in most of the classics, he was in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Hondo. He made four movies with Howard Hawks, including El Dorado and Red River (with his son-in-law Harry Carey Jr. and of course Harry Carey himself). He was in Giant and The Sons of Katie Elder and To Kill a Mockingbird. He was in The Bad Seed and Johnny Guitar and Dirty Dingus Magee. As soon as there was TV, he started making TV, and his credits there are as massive and as varied.

Fix was one of the classic character actors, in short. Was he ever a lead actor? I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem to have had that sort of career. But it’s impossible to scroll through his list of credits without coming across several dozen things you’ve heard of and probably no few you’ve actually seen. If not everyone has my fondness for The Littlest Hobo, or even familiarity with it, you’ve at the very least heard of Perry Mason. The Twilight Zone. Adventures of Superman. His first TV credit is a 1950 episode of The Lone Ranger.

Yes, Fix was mostly a Western actor. I’m not going to count how many Westerns he did, and not just because we’ll be getting into the weeds of what counts as a Western, but dozens at minimum and almost certainly well over a hundred. Okay, yes, that’s a lot easier when you have 338 IMDb credits. Still, Donald Pleasance has 245 and I’m pretty sure very few of those were Westerns. Careers vary, and Fix had a Western career. Even a lot of the TV shows he did that weren’t actually Westerns had vaguely Western-adjacent episodes, like Quincy, M.E., that he appeared on.

He is also another one of those actors whose career lasts into my own lifetime from literally the silent era. His first movie was 1925’s The Perfect Clown, starring now-obscure comedian Larry Semon and featuring a pre-Laurel Oliver Hardy. He has ten credits in my lifetime, finishing with that 1981 Quincy episode. Hollywood is one of the only places where you expect people to keep working until they basically drop dead in harness even in the earlier days, and while Fix seems to have had two years of retirement before his death in 1983, he was still 82 at the time.