Born in Clayton, John Anderson grew up in Quincy and Adams County. After attending college at Iowa and serving in WWII, Anderson went from performing on Mississippi River showboats to amassing hundreds of stage, film, and television credits. John Anderson's many screen roles included used-car huckster Charlie in PSYCHO (1960), the title character in THE LINCOLN CONSPIRACY (1977) and a dead ringer for baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, whom Anderson portrayed twice, in EIGHT MEN OUT (1988) and the TV biopic BABE RUTH (1991). A veteran of 500 TV appearances (including Gunsmoke, the Virginian, Dallas, four guest stints on The Twilight Zone, and ironically, Quincy), John Anderson was seen as FDR in the 1978 miniseries Backstairs in the White House, the Civil War mini-series North and South, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was a regular as Michael Spencer Hudson in the daytime drama Another World, Virgil Earp in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61), and Harry Jackson in MacGyver (1985-1991). He was also the uncredited voice of Mark Twain in the Epcot attraction The American Adventure.
Watch John Anderson in The Twilight Zone episode, The Odyssey of Flight 33...
John Anderson was arguably one of the most successful and versatile character actors in all of television history. Any television fan of his era has seen him in several of his almost countless appearances.
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