Richard Pontius sent two questions and I'm going to answer one here today and one here tomorrow. Here's today's…
Back in the days before residuals, how did television character actors support themselves between jobs? Not the Charles Lanes, Burt Mustins or Vito Scottis who seemed to appear in every single network series every single season from the 50s to early 70s, but the folks without a recurring role who we might recognize but who weren't in as high demand.
In television, there weren't many days "before residuals" for actors because they started in 1952 and most of the shows before that were live and not rerun.
Residuals weren't a lot at first…then they were raised but they were finite. After a certain number of reruns, the performers got bupkis. That changed during the 1973-1974 season and if you were on a show after that, you get residuals in perpetuity. (Don Knotts made a lot more money off the residuals from his five years on Three's Company than he made for his five years on The Andy Griffith Show even though the latter has rerun many, many more times. He, like most, was quite sore about not being paid for the rerunning of his earlier work.)
Anyway, the answer to your question is that acting is not a lucrative profession for most of its practitioners. Never has been, never will be. Residuals from TV appearances help but regardless, a large percentage of actors always need some sort of supplemental income. I know a lady who did a fair amount of television in the sixties but was never a regular on a series. She acted under her stage name while selling real estate under her real name…and when she met clients as a realtor, she would put on a wig, do different make-up, change her voice a bit and hope few people said, "Hey, didn't I see you last night on Mannix?"
In the seventies, her agent left the business and since she wasn't working a lot then, she couldn't get another. So what she did was to invent her own agent. She put in an extra phone line in her home. Then she made up the name of a mythical manager and listed it with SAG and AFTRA. If you called one of those unions wanting to hire her, you got that name and number. And if you called that number, you got her using a fake voice and she'd arrange an audition or booking for her client.
Also, there are a lot of acting jobs you never hear about. I'm thinking now of an actor friend who managed to get four or five days of scale work per year on TV shows and from the infrequency of seeing him, you might wonder how he was able to pay his rent. He was lucky: He got picked to do a series of regional commercials that were filmed in Hollywood but never run on this coast. He made way more from those than he did from guesting on national TV programs. There are also voiceover jobs, industrial films, stage work, stand-in jobs and other sources of income. Some try teaching their craft.
But acting has never been the steadiest of occupations and I guess the answer to your question is that some of them didn't support themselves between jobs…or had to live very frugal lives. It will probably always be like that.
