Peter Leeds spent much of his career standing next to someone more famous and making that person funnier. It sounds like a secondary skill until you consider the names who kept hiring him: Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Johnny Carson, Milton Berle, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton. A good straight man does not merely wait for the punch line. He controls the resistance the comedian needs to push against.

Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1917, Leeds trained at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and worked on Broadway before radio and screen work expanded the career. He was tall, adaptable and capable of sounding official without becoming dull, which made him useful as the agent, policeman, interviewer, executive, crook or ordinary citizen whose job was to give the scene structure while somebody else broke it apart.

Radio used that versatility on a massive scale. Leeds was reportedly heard in more than 3,000 broadcasts. Crime and mystery programs such as Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, The Line Up, Rogues Gallery, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe and Escape used his dramatic side, while comedy and variety shows depended on the straight-man instincts that became his specialty. The two careers were not separate. Both required him to listen closely, react precisely and never pull focus simply to prove he was acting.

Bob Hope understood Leeds’s value particularly well. After working together on screen and broadcast material, Hope took him on fourteen international tours entertaining American military personnel. Those tours put straight-man technique under conditions very different from a controlled studio. The supporting performer had to adjust to locations, audiences and circumstances while keeping the star’s rhythm intact.

Television magnified the volume. Contemporary obituaries credited Leeds with more than 8,000 television appearances. He backed up major comedians, played dramatic guest roles and remained the kind of performer producers could call when a scene needed an experienced professional more than a celebrity. Lucille Ball reportedly asked for him repeatedly. Johnny Carson used him. The career accumulated through return invitations.

Leeds also spent part of that career representing performers rather than only performing. He served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists from 1971 to 1976 and received the union’s Gold Card. The work fits the biography. Someone who had spent decades as a supporting professional understood how much of entertainment depended on people whose names were not above the title.

He died in 1996 at 79. Leeds never had a single character that swallowed the rest of his career. That absence may be the clearest sign of what he was good at. He could serve thousands of different scenes without needing every audience to remember Peter Leeds when the scene was over.