Orson Bean Orson Bean, born Dallas Frederick Burroughs (July 22, 1928 in Burlington, Vermont), is an American film, television, and stage actor, as well as a successful director and author. He made a variety of appearances on game shows in the 60's, 70's and 80's. Bean is perhaps best known as a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth, which provided a fitting forum for his affable wit.
On one To Tell the Truth episode in 1965, the panel was to try to guess which of three contestants was the real Harvard University Chief of Police, George Burroughs, who was Orson's father. The happily stunned Orson disqualified himself from the questioning.
Bean made frequent guest appearances on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson). He also played storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its five-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the short-lived sitcom Normal, Ohio.
Bean is a second cousin to former President of the United States Calvin Coolidge.
He was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.
Two of his significant credits were playing the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King.
Orson Bean has been married to Alley Mills (who is twenty-three years his junior) since 1993.
Being John Malkovich (1999)
