They don’t build lives like Alice Backes’ anymore. Too much veneer now, not enough backbone. She came into the world in 1923 Salt Lake City, first daughter of a rock-wool salesman and a mother from Montana, a tall girl in a dry town with mountains watching like old judges. She had music in her hands before she had scripts. At the University of Utah she worked the violin like it was a second spine, ended up concert mistress of the orchestra, the one who stands up first and pulls everyone else into tune. That’s an early note on her: not the star in the spotlight, but the one who quietly keeps the whole thing from falling apart.Then the world caught fire. Pearl Harbor, the country shaking from its sleep, and Alice did what people did back when patriotism meant blisters instead of slogans. She joined the WAVES, the women’s branch of the Naval Reserve, and traded symphony halls for shore stations in Chicago and San Francisco. She drove jeeps, not because it was glamorous, but because somebody had to get things and people from one place to another without killing them on the way. The uniform hung on her 5’9” frame and she just kept moving.
After the war, she didn’t go home and turn into a scrapbook. She took that height, that violin spine, and went to Hollywood. Not for the fairy tale. She wasn’t the fairy-tale type and Hollywood already had more than enough blond miracles. What she had was a voice, timing, the kind of ordinary face that fit into every coffee shop, hospital, and courthouse in America. Casting directors love that kind of face; they can hang any life on it.
She started on the radio first, when stories lived in the dark between your ears. Shows like This Is Your FBI, NBC University Theater, Dangerous Assignment, Family Theater. She could switch dialects, slide into anybody: a nervous wife, a switchboard operator, the woman on the other end of the bad news. You didn’t see her, but you believed her. That was the job.
Television showed up like a flashy younger cousin, and she moved over without whining about the good old days. In the 1950s alone, she bounced through more than twenty series. Secretaries, nurses, neighbors, the lady in the background who somehow felt more real than the leads. Gang Busters, Dragnet, Mr. and Mrs. North, Medic, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Bachelor Father, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke—you can almost map the American psyche just by following the shows that paid her day rate.
She was one of those actors whose résumé reads like a TV Guide from the Eisenhower years straight through to the Reagan hangover. Westerns, sitcoms, cop dramas, anthology shows. The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Bewitched, The Andy Griffith Show, Adam-12, Here’s Lucy, Barnaby Jones, Knight Rider, Mr. Belvedere, and finally Columbo, where she took her last bow in “A Trace of Murder” in the late ’90s.
You don’t get famous doing that kind of work. You get something else: you become part of the wallpaper of a culture. People don’t know your name, but they know your walk, your voice, the way you arch an eyebrow when some idiot says something that doesn’t deserve an answer.
There’s that moment on The Andy Griffith Show—she’s Olive, the widowed waitress in Mayberry. Barney Fife orders half the county’s food supply, and she hugs the pad to her chest and says, “It does my heart good to see a thin person eat.” The line is light, but the way she plays it, you feel a whole little life there: a woman who lost something, works too many hours for too little money, and still finds joy in watching a scrawny deputy inhale pancakes. That’s the kind of thing a day player can mail in. Alice doesn’t. She gives Olive a soul, then walks out of the episode and out of your life, like most people you meet.
The films? They were never designed to make her a marquee, but they kept her busy and interesting. The Twonky, a strange little science-fiction comedy. I Want to Live!, hard time and bad choices. It Started with a Kiss, That Touch of Mink with big shiny stars floating above the title while she worked down in the character trenches: phone operator, nurse, teacher, farmer’s wife, gossip columnist, whatever the story needed. Snowball Express, Gable and Lombard, The Cat from Outer Space—you’d see her pop up, do something true and unassuming, then vanish while the leads hit their marks.
She never looked like an actress trying to be noticed. Maybe that was the secret. According to one capsule biography, she was “rather commonplace” in appearance, tall but not glamorous, which is exactly why she could disappear into all those dentists, librarians, judges, and waitresses. The world is mostly made of such people. She knew how to wear them.
Off camera, she wasn’t drifting around looking for compliments about her work. She gave time and money to children’s causes and animal welfare, served on boards and committees, sat in rooms with bad coffee and long agendas so someone else’s life could get a little less cruel. UNICEF, women’s press groups, animal foundations, her unions, her theatre, her guild—she showed up, did the committee grind, the unglamorous work that keeps institutions from falling apart. The kind of labor that never wins awards on live TV but would leave a hole if it stopped.
Her one marriage was to a sound-effects man, Milton Citron. Of course it was a sound man. She came out of radio, lived in dialogue and timing and footsteps and doors closing, the invisible art that makes stories feel real. They were together for more than twenty years, no kids, just two people in the industry on the practical side of fantasy. He died in 1983. She kept going.
Underneath the credits and causes, there was still the musician, the girl who led an orchestra once. In retirement she went back to that quiet obsession—classical scores, Broadway, early choral works. You can picture her in some small Los Angeles room, stacks of music, the TV off for once, tracing lines of melody written by people who’d never heard of pilot season.
In the end, like a lot of working actors, she slipped away far from the soundstages. She left Los Angeles in 2006 for Virginia Beach to be closer to family, as if after fifty years of pretending to be everyone’s neighbor and teacher and nurse, she finally wanted to just be somebody’s relative. She died in her sleep the next year, eighty-three years old. No drama. No third-act twist. Natural causes. Her body was cremated, her ashes scattered into the Pacific—back to the same ocean she’d spent decades living beside.
Later, her peers in the Screen Actors Guild took a moment on national television to say, essentially, “We saw you. We remember.” A brief recognition in a long ceremony full of stars whose names everyone knows. But that’s fitting. She was always the supporting beam, never the chandelier.
And somewhere, in a late-night rerun, a thin deputy is ordering too much breakfast, and a tall woman with kind eyes presses a notepad to her chest and says it does her heart good. She’s on the screen for a few minutes. Then she’s gone. That’s okay. She already did the job.
