Solid character actor who also played a few action leads in 1950s films and TV. Tobey began playing bit parts shortly after WWII (a police photographer in Robert Siodmak's noir, "The File on Thelma Jordan", and a sentry in Henry King's war drama, "Twelve O'Clock High", both 1949). His first of a handful of leading roles in features came in one of his best-remembered films, the suspenseful science-fiction classic, "The Thing" (1951). As would be common for much of the rest of his career, Tobey played a dependable, unspectacular, heroic sort, in this case, the captain of a remote frozen outpost
