Career Highlights: Goin' to Town, The Dude Goes West, Man from Headquarters
First Major Screen Credit: Man from Headquarters (1942)
Biography
Short, portly, and possessed of a high-pitched laugh that cuts through the air like a buzzsaw, Massachussetts-born Dick Elliott had been on stage for nearly thirty before making his screen bow in 1933. Elliott was a frequent visitor to Broadway, enjoying a substantial run in the marathon hit Abie's Irish Rose. Physically and vocally unchanged from his first screen appearance in the '30s to his last in 1961, Elliott was most generally cast in peripheral roles designed to annoy the film's principal characters with his laughing jags or his obtrusive behavior; in this capacity, he appeared as drunken conventioneers, loud-mouthed theatre audience members, and "helpful" pedestrians. Elliott also excelled playing small-scale authority figures, such as stage managers, truant officers and rural judges. Still acting into his mid 70s, Dick Elliott appeared regularly as the mayor of Mayberry on the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, and was frequently cast as a department-store Santa in the Yuletide programs of such comics as Jack Benny and Red Skelton. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Richard "Dick" Elliott (April 30, 1886 – December 22, 1961) was an American character actor from the 1930s until the time of his death.
He played many different roles, in over 240 films, typically as a somewhat blustery sort, such as a politician. A short, fat man, Elliott played Santa Claus on the Jimmy Durante, Andy Griffith, Red Skelton, and Jack Benny Shows. He had a couple of memorable lines in It's a Wonderful Life, where he scolded James Stewart, who was trying to say goodnight to Donna Reed, advising him to stop hemming and hawing and just go ahead and kiss her.
He also had a few memorable appearances in episodes of the Adventures of Superman TV series. He is perhaps best known as Mayor Pike in early episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, which would prove to be almost his last screen work.