Richard "Dick" Miller (born December 25, 1928) is an American character actor who has appeared in many films, particularly those produced by Roger Corman, and later in films of directors who started their careers with Corman, including Joe Dante and James Cameron (specifically, he has appeared in every one of Joe Dante's movies).
Miller was born in The Bronx, New York and attended the City College of New York as well as Columbia University. blank">Dick Miller Biography - Yahoo! Movies He performed on _Broadway and also worked at the Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic and the psychiatric department of Queens General Hospital. In 1952, he moved to California seeking work as a writer.
His roles in movies include White Line Fever, The Terminator, Night of the Creeps, Small Soldiers, The Little Shop of Horrors, Amazon Women on the Moon and The Howling. His best known role was in the movies Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch as Murray Futterman. He appeared in Pulp Fiction as Monster Joe, but his scene and a few others were deleted because of the length of the film. His television credits include V: The Final Battle as Dan Pascal, and appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the season 1 episode "The Big Goodbye" as the newspaper stand man in the holodeck, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the season 3 two-part episode "Past Tense" as Vin, Time of Your Life, and he voiced the gangster Chuckie Sol in the animated feature film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
Miller has played a character named "Walter Paisley" in many films, beginning with A Bucket of Blood (1959).
In 2000, Miller was featured alongside former collaborators including Roger Corman, Sam Arkoff and Peter Bogdanovich in the documentary SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies, a film about the rise and fall of American exploitation cinema.
Richard (Dick) Mathias Miller (born April 26 1958, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a retired American professional basketball player. He was a 6'6" (198 cm) 215 lb (98 kg) power forward and played collegiately at the University of Toledo from 1976 to 1980. He played a handful of games in the National Basketball Association (NBA).
Miller was selected with the 17th pick of the second round in the 1980 NBA Draft by the Indiana Pacers. He played 5 games for the Pacers and another 3 games for the Utah Jazz in 1980-81.
A native from the Bronx, New York, Richard "Dick" Miller served in the U.S. Navy for a few years and earned a prize title as a middleweight boxer. He settled in Los Angeles in the mid 1950s where he was noticed by Roger Corman who cast him in most of his low budget horror films where he usually played unlikeable sorts beginning as a vacuum cleaning salesman in Not of This Earth. But his most memorable role is in a rare starring role in playing the mentally unstable, busboy/beatnik artist Walter Paisley, whose clay sculptures are suspiciously lifelike in A Bucket of Blood. But he is best remembered for a supporting role as the flower-eating Vurson Fouch in Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors. He then spent the next 20 years working in Roger Corman productions, and starting in the late 1970s Joe Dante flicks, appearing in credited and uncredited walk-on bits playing quirky chatterboxes which he stole every scene he appeared in. His role of Walter Paisley has been repeated many times such as a diner owner (Twilight Zone-The Movie) or a janitor (Chopping Mall). One of his best bits is the funny occult bookshop owner in The Howling. Being short (so he never played a romantic lead or a threatening villain), with wavy hair, long sideburns, a pointed nose, and a face as trustful as a used-car dealer's, he was, and still is to this day, an immediately recognizable character actor whose one-scene appearances in countless movies and TV shows guarantee audience applause.
