- Born
- Died
- Birth nameDaniel Malloy Tobin
- Height5′ 10″ (1.78 m)
- Dan Tobin's career in Hollywood as a small part supporting player spanned three decades, beginning in 1939. Adding to his slightly shifty appearance -- squinty eyes, high cheekbones and generally sporting a thin moustache -- was a fussy, bumptious manner, which made him ideal typecasting as supercilious, miserly, smugly conceited or obsequious types. Though Tobin's screen personae could be sinister, or at least underhanded, they also often provided comic relief, as, for instance, his somewhat camp, bow-tied employee Gerald Howe in Woman of the Year (1942). On stage, he had his biggest hit in Philip Barry's classic comedy play "The Philadelphia Story" (Broadway (1939-40), playing the part of Alexander 'Sandy' Lord.
By the mid-1950's, Tobin had drifted from films towards guest appearances in early anthology series and sitcoms on television. He had a regular spot in the final season of Perry Mason (1957) as Raymond Burr's restaurateur friend Terrance Clay. As the ideal character to be deflated, he was also employed to good comic effect in several episodes of Bewitched (1964) and The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (1968). Tobin retired from acting in 1977 and died five years later at the age of 72. He had been married to TV scriptwriter Jean Holloway.- IMDb mini biography by: I.S.Mowis
- SpouseJean Holloway(September 9, 1951 - November 26, 1982) (his death)
- His final film role was opposite John Huston in Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, shot in the early 1970s and released in 2018.
- Tobin's most memorable roles were as the overbearing secretary, Gerald, in the 1942 film Woman of the Year and the top-billed scientist in Orson Welles's innovative, Peabody Award-winning, unsold television pilot The Fountain of Youth, filmed in 1956 and televised once two years later as an instalment of NBC's Colgate Theatre.
- In 1966, he became a regular during the final season of Perry Mason as the proprietor of Clay's Grill.
- Tobin made his Broadway debut in American Holiday in 1936. He then joined a touring troupe in England and was seen by an impresario in a production of Ah, Wilderness! As a result, he won roles in Behind Your Back at London's Strand Theatre (1937) and Mary Goes to See at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (1938).
- He generally portrayed gentle, urbane, rather fussy, sometimes obsequious and shifty characters, sometimes with a concealed edge of malice.
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