Walter Lane Smith III (April 29, 1936 – June 13, 2005) was an American actor. Some of his well known roles included portraying collaborator entrepreneur Nathan Bates in the NBC television series V, Mayor Bates in the film Red Dawn, newspaper editor Perry White in the ABC series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, district attorney Jim Trotter III in My Cousin Vinny and American President Richard Nixon in The Final Days, for which he received a Golden Globe award nomination.
Lane Smith was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1936. He graduated from The Leelanau School, a boarding school in Glen Arbor, Michigan where he is enshrined in the school's Hall of Fame, and spent one year boarding at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania before going off to study at the Actors Studio in the late 1950s and early 1960s along with Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.
After his graduation, he found steady work in New York theater before making his film debut in Maidstone in 1970. During the 1970s, he regularly made appearances in small film roles including Rooster Cogburn in 1975 and Network in 1976. He also acted on television, notably playing a U.S. Marine in Vietnam in the made for
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