Biography
William Alland was an American actor, producer and writer. He began his career in the theatre and radio with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, appearing in the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast before playing the reporter Jerry Thompson (and providing the uncredited voice of the News on the March narrator) in Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).
After wartime service as a combat pilot, Alland produced radio drama, winning a Peabody Award for Doorway to Life. He later became a prolific film producer at Universal-International, specialising in science-fiction and monster films directed by Jack Arnold, including It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and its sequels, Tarantula (1955), This Island Earth (1955) and The Deadly Mantis (1957). His later credits included the Western The Rare Breed (1966). He also directed Look in Any Window (1961).
