Born in London in 1902, Frederick Piper worked as a tea merchant before starting his acting career on the stage in the 1920s, playing in London productions and also touring as far afield as Canada. His first film appearance came in the 1933 production The Good Companions. An unassuming man with no trappings of ambition or conceit, Piper rapidly earned a reputation as a reliable, congenial presence on set and became a first choice for directors with smaller roles to cast, accumulating screen credits at the rate of up to six a year through to the 1960s. He appeared as an extra in Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much (credited as “Policeman with Rifle”), and the following year was cast again by Hitchcock in the role of the milkman in the famous scene with Robert Donat in The 39 Steps. Piper was only on screen for seconds, but the iconic nature of the scene ultimately made this probably his most famous film appearance. Later minor roles for Hitchcock were Sabotage (1936 – as the doomed bus conductor), Young and Innocent (1937) and Jamaica Inn (1939 – as Charles Laughton’s agent). Piper’s services were always in demand, and he is said to have once joked that he had cornered the market in unnamed police officers and barmen. From the late 1930s he became associated with Ealing Studios, appearing in dozens of their productions, from cheaply shot programmers through to the company’s most prestigious films such as In Which We Serve (1942). Most of Piper’s roles were fleeting and his name rarely appeared in promotional material, but there was an occasional more substantial part in films such as Nine Men (1943), The October Man (1947) and Hunted (1952). In 1947, Piper played in Hue and Cry, the film which became known as the first in the canon of classic Ealing Comedies; he later also appeared in Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951). From the early 1960s film work began to dry up, but Piper continued to find work in television, a medium on which he had first appeared as early as 1938 in a production of J. B. Priestley’s play Laburnum Grove for the fledgling BBC. His TV credits during the 1960s included popular series such as Danger Man, Dixon of Dock Green and cult favourite The Prisoner. Piper’s last credit however was in a film, a minor role in the 1971 production Burke & Hare. Piper died in London on 22 September 1979, one day short of his 77th birthday.