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William Schallert Dies At 93: Prolific Character Actor Led SAG Strike, Played Patty Duke’s Dad, And Voiced Milton The Toaster In Pop-Tarts Ads

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 07:47 PST, May 9, 2016

William Schallert has died at age 93. The prolific character actor, best known for his role as doting dad Martin Lane on The Patty Duke Show, passed away at his home in Pacific Palisades on May 8, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Schallert’s son, Edwin, confirmed the sad news. William Schallert’s death comes just a few weeks after his TV daughter passed away.

William Schallert was a beloved character actor whose career began in 1947. While he was known for playing “everyman” types, Schallert once told the New York Times that he wasn’t particularly selective about the roles that he played, something he admitted “wasn’t the best way to build a career.”

Still, his choices paid off. During his lengthy career, Schallert appeared on popular classic TV shows, including The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Waltons, and Maude. He continued to work as an actor all the way up until 2014 despite the fact that he suffered from peripheral neuropathy and had to wear braces on his legs. In more recent years, Schallert turned up on the TV hits Desperate Housewives, Medium, How I Met Your Mother, and True Blood. William’s last acting credit came in 2014 when he played an elevator operator on the sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

Schallert once said he was most recognized for his role in the iconic 1967 Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” William played the Federation Undersecretary of Agricultural Affairs Nilz Baris in the classic episode. In an interview with StarTrek.com, William said the Star Trek episode was just another acting job to him at the time, and he had no idea the significance it would later have.

“[I had] started to get into voiceovers and that began to take over my life,” Schallert said. “For the next 20 or 25 years, that’s where I made most of my money, even though I kept working in television. So, Star Trek was just a job and I was playing a rather stuffy bureaucrat, not the most appealing character. I was not a Star Trek fan. I didn’t watch the show.”

In the interview, Schallert said he made the bulk of his income doing voiceovers after The Patty Duke Show ended in 1966, and at one point, he was the go-to guy for voiceover work.

“I got very hot for a while,” William said. “I was really the (voiceover) flavor of the month for three or four years. Then it dropped off, but I stayed at a nice, healthy level, and I kept working on camera.”

Speaking of his voice work, William Schallert also got commercials. The actor voiced the Milton the Toaster character in the long-running ad campaign for Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts in the 1970s. In an interview posted by Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict, Schallert joked that the Pop-Tarts ads paid for his kids’ education.

“I used to love the character!” William said. “I put my kids through grad school with Milton…I was on the air for ten years as that character and then they killed it by accident. I think the writers used to really hate writing for Milton. They were beginning to go crazy coming up with things for me to do that were worthwhile to put on the air.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWRisb7smFg

Schallert revealed that a Pop-Tarts commercial that featured a little girl touching the hot toaster to see if Milton had a fever is what did the campaign in. Viewers were upset that the little girl put her hand on the hot toaster.

“So that was the end of the gravy train all because they overreached a little bit,” Schallert said. “I did four spots a year, it paid off like a slot machine and there were no conflicts with anything else I did. It was an ideal job.”

While William Schallert was a huge actor’s advocate, his time as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1979 to 1981 saw one of the longest and most contentious TV strikes in history at 94 days.

William Schallert is survived by his three sons, Edwin, Mark, and Brendan, and seven grandchildren. Schallert’s wife of more than 60 years, Leah Waggner, died last year.

[Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images]

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