Like The Wizard of Oz 60 years earlier.
The Nero Wolfe series was the first thing I thought of, since they used the same highly memorable actors in completely different roles from week to week, but that’s already been mentioned.
The 1960s incarnation of Dragnet re-used the same actors frequently in very different roles.
Somewhat. I haven’t watched it in awhile, but I remember he was…
a rich man (who turns out to be a drug kingpin)
a (too) sensitive guy (who can’t stop crying)
a basketball star (who turns out to have a tiny penis)
a superintelligent guy (who turns out to be gay)
Quite a few changes for a 93 minute movie. The DVD extras showed that he had also become a music star, but that didn’t make it into the movie
I have a film buff friend who, when you ask him about an obscure actor he mentioned, will say "Oh, him? He’s a That Guy…"
There were numerous actors in different roles on Supernatural. Alexia Fast, for example, played homicidal little Missy Bender in *The Benders, and then Emma in The Slice Girls.
There used to be a website by this name, but it disappearted over the years.
https://www.amazon.com/Hey-Its-That-Tara-Ariano/dp/1594740429
Vito Scotti made a career of this in the 60s. Whenever they needed an Italian or other ethnic actor, he was called.
Greg Morris was twice on Dick Van Dyke.
Yeah, he played a Japanese soldier and an Italian-ish mad scientist on Gilligan’s Island (three different episodes).
Nitpick: Sailor, not soldier. He’d been living inside a midget submarine for 20 years because he didn’t know WWII was over
Actors like John van Dreelin and Karl-Otto Alberty made whole careers out of playing Nazis on TV and in the movies.
Excuse me, Tiger tank commander in Kelly’s Heroes, but aren’t you the same guy who arrested Richard Attenborough in The Great Escape and captured Richard Burton in Raid on Rommel?
(In that last movie, the Germans were so stupid you’d expect to see road signs saying ACHTUNG! This way to the ammo dump! —>)
John van Dreelin even played post-WWII Nazis in series like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Jack Webb liked to cast the same actors again and again. Virginia Gregg played 13 different characters in Dragnet '67, six in Adam-12, and hit the big time when she played the same character twice in her six appearances on Emergency.
D’oh…
Also of interest: Leonard Nimoy played two different German-speaking GIs (Baum and Neumann) on Combat! The episodes were two years apart (1963 and '65), so I can understand why nobody paid much attention to it.
I brought this up in a recent thread on a similar topic. The A&E series (A Nero Wolfe Mystery, BTW) had two main characters (Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin), a half dozen recurring characters, and then a repertory pool of a dozen or so actors who played most of the one-episode characters, playing a different character each time they appeared
A particularly odd case was Kari Matchett, who played both a recurring character and was part of the repertory pool and played various one-episode characters. She even played her recurring character and a different one-episode character in the same episode.
Brooke Adams (wife of Tony Shalhoub) played five characters on Monk.
Shera Danese (wife of Peter Falk) played six characters on Columbo.
It helps to be married to the star of the show.
Burt Mustin and Jon Lorner could have played brothers.There was always something “inscrutably” elusive to Mustin, a not quite there quality. Not one foot in the grave, but maybe one fry short of a happy meal. Jon Lormer could and did play elderly men still gainfully employed, as can be seen in his many appearance as coroners on Perry Mason. A lot of the same actors made repeat performances, often in a wide variety of roles. It was a virtual repertory company, one that included such players as Virginia Vincent, Harry Townes, Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan, Otto Kruger, Paul Fix, Lillian Bronson, Linda Watkins, Berry Kroger, Douglas Dick, Don Bubbins, Kevin Hagen, Sean McClory, Roy Roberts, Joyce Meadows.
Heck, he was the coroner on an episode of PETER GUNN, after which they had him show up as the judge in another episode — just like he’d show up as a judge in both episodes of a BRANDED two-parter, only to later show back up as a colonel in another episode; and he was a pastor, and later a conductor, on THE FUGITIVE; and a doctor, and then a senator, on THE BIG VALLEY; and so on for episodes of STAR TREK and episodes of GUNSMOKE and episodes of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and et cetera — and he kept showing up for work in his seventies, whenever they needed him to play a preacher on THE DUKES OF HAZZARD or a butler on MAGNUM PI or whatever.
“The Fugitive” used to do that a lot as well. One actor (Andrew Prine) played the lead’s brother in one episode, then showed up later as some random bad guy. Double-checking his IMDB page, he also did a couple episodes of Star Trek (TNG and DS9). Maybe I should go over to that topic as well.
On Law & Order, Larry Miller was on three times, once as himself and twice as a recurring bad guy.
Columbo, which had few recurring characters, had a lot of minor actors recur in different roles. and some bigger names (Patrick McGoohan, Robert Culp, Jack Cassidy) showed up 3 or 4 times as the killer of the week.
I’m not an actor but I watch them on TV. One thing I’ve heard is that if you see a character actor on show after show it’s guaranteed that they are nice people who people like to work with. Diva behavior is tolerated to some (or more) extent with stars who bring in viewers. A character actor who doesn’t show up early and prepared and isn’t a pleasure to work with is soon unemployed. Producers and casting directors know.
I remember a playbill for Broadway where one of the actors put as one of his accomplishments “The only New York actor to not have appeared on Law and Order.” There are more reoccurring roles on Law and Order both because of how long it was on and the smaller pool of actors because it’s filmed in NYC. No one is flying in an actor from LA to do two lines as “Guy with the box.”
The first show that came to mind was Route 66. Like many shows of the period, actors got called back quite a few times to play different characters. Taking a look at the IMDB credits, there is a long list of people who appeared in multiple episodes.