PORTSMOUTH — You might have seen his face in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” with Sean Connery or “The Cincinnati Kid,” or you might remember his characters from television shows like “Walker, Texas Ranger,” “MacGyver,” “L.A. Law” and “Dynasty.”
The late Milton Selzer is memorable because of the hundreds of films, television shows and Broadway plays he acted in over the last 50 years. His face is also recognizable in Portsmouth, Selzer’s home town. Until his retirement in the 1990s, Selzer, who died Oct. 21, 2006 in Oxnard, Calif., at age 88, played mobsters, gamblers and crooks, as well as characters with a softer side, including upstanding gents, store owners, judges and colonels.
“He played all kinds of characters; that’s just the way the business is,” Selzer’s wife, Alice, said. “In some shows, he had what they call a recurring role, so he wasn’t in every week. When you’re an actor, you just wait for the phone to ring and that’s what you get.”
But no matter what the character or where the job took him, Selzer always remembered Portsmouth. “He loved Portsmouth. It’s such a beautiful place,” Alice said. “We went back a lot to visit, and Milton attended all his high school reunions.”
It was in high school that Selzer participated in school plays and where he first caught the acting bug. That led him to New York, where he had roles in Broadway plays and early television shows and films, enabling his move to Hollywood, where he found his niche as a character actor.
Alice laughed that her husband seemed to play many bad guys throughout his career, a role very different from the one he played at home, where he was a loving family man to herself and their son, Ethan. “Like on ‘L.A. Law,’ he played a crooked judge who was killed, as he sometimes got killed on the shows,” Alice said. “His mother would barely be able to watch it; it would bother her too much.”
Jennifer Feals, Portsmith Herald, Nov. 28, 2006.
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