Until she, of course, gets her own series.
Even though we hear John Forsythe, we never actually see Charlie.
Similarly, aside from his arm (he was always shot from behind, sitting in a hair), you never saw John Beresford Tipton, the titular benefactor of the 1950s TV series The Millionaire
Laura does not qualify (unless you fall asleep in the middle)… but it’s still a pretty good movie.
But Rebecca does.
The same with George Steinbrenner (voiced by Larry David) in Seinfeld
He is always shown from behind sitting at a desk.
Yes he does (if you’re talking about the movie). The “thin man” description is applied to the character Clyde Wynant who has two or three scenes in the beginning of the movie, before he disappears.
I didn’t watch Magnum, PI much but did Robin Masters ever put in an appearance?
Two monster movies, believe it or not, also fit in here.
She-Wolf of London (1946), starring a very young June Lockhart as the “Larry Talbot” figure who turns into the titular beast, and Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), written by Curt Siodmak, who wrote lots of Universal monsters, including the original The Wolfman
In both movies, it’s revealed at the end that the “monster” doesn’t actually exist. Someone is dressing up as the monster and putting on a show to scare people off, or convince someone that they’re insane.
Oddly enough, Siodmak wanted to do pretty much the same thing in The Wolfman, not showing Lon Chaney Jr. transforming into the man-beast, and leaving it ambiguous if he is really transforming, or just thinks he is. Near the end, when he’s being chased, he sees his reflection in a pool of water as The Wolfman – but is it real, or just in his head?
Wisely, the folks at Universal changed this so that there’s no doubt that Talbot is really changing into a Wolfman. The proof is that the Wolfman movies keep getting shown, while She Wolf of London and Curucu Beast of the Amazon are mere footnotes in cinematic history. Even Svengoolie doesn’t show them.
Plus, any adults (except on TV where you get a sad trombone.)
In at least one of the early Peanuts comic strips an adult actually got a word balloon, although they weren’t shown.
John Connor in the first Terminator film? Judges?
One with a twist:
In Day of The Jackal no one has any idea who the main character is, – right up to the slam-bang ending – but we know.
One of my all-time films (and books), but we definitely see the Jackal throughout the movie. We just don’t know who he is.
And the book’s and movie’s final twist is that it turns out that
The Jackal isn’t Charles Harold Calthrop, who we’ve thought it was all along. We even get to see C.H. Calthrop. “So if The Jackal wasn’t Calthrop, then who the hell was he?”
Indeed
But he doesn’t really belong in this thread, I think.
Even listing the title would spoil the whole thing — which seems to be inevitable in this thread, but, still:
In THE PLEDGE, Jack Nicholson is the retired cop now obsessed with the idea that the dead guy who’d confessed to a string of horrifying crimes — the guy who wasn’t all that bright, and maybe wasn’t quite right in the head — wasn’t the real killer: that the real killer is still out there, practically licking his lips at the prospect of preying on yet another little girl.
So what holds the whole movie together is the idea that the real killer is being accurately profiled by someone who’s now (a) calling in every favor from his days on the force while (b) using a little girl as bait to lure that killer into a trap. Only, well, apparently he got it wrong; the killer doesn’t actually show up as expected, which maybe means he got profiled wrong? Or maybe our hero was wrong about a killer even still having been out there. And I said “our hero”, but I said he was using a little girl as bait, which, holy fuck. And I said he called in all his favors from his days on the force, and — much like the little girl’s mother does — they can’t even really put into words how much they now look down on him. And, in the end, he breaks down over having been so, so wrong.
Also, on a road not too far from there, there was a bad car crash where the driver burned to death; maybe that guy had been in a big hurry? It’s as if he’d been really, really looking forward to something.
He’s probably abroad; he often is. 
The Little Red-Haired Girl appeared onscreen in the TV special A Charlie Brown Valentine.
I was thinking about the book, oops. I may have misremembered that as well though.
She was also in the Peanuts theatrical movie a few years back (which wasn’t that bad, IIRC).
In the “Mission Impossible” TV series, does the “Secretary” ever appear? (“If you or your IM force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions”).
We’re getting away from my original intent, but that’s OK – the point is to spur discussion.
What I wanna know is Who was the guy who read the announcements over the speaker system in the TV show M.A.S.H?
I don’t mean Radar or Klinger – we see them sometimes speaking into the microphone, just as we see Blake or Potter or Hawkeye or someone else doing it.
No, I mean the person who talks over the speaker in practically every episode. It’s someone we never see on camera, and we don’t know his name.
And I don’t mean the name of the actor who did it (Todd Susman, evidently) – I mean the person who, in the series “bible” and continuity, did it. Howcum we never saw him or learned his name? (Susman also played a character named Private Danny Baker on the show, but that doesn’t mean that Baker was the Phantom Announcer).