Tony Earnshaw on Invasion of the Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy enjoyed a career that spanned eight decades. He was a familiar face on American television via 200 separate appearances in shows as diverse as The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Banacek, Dynasty and Fame.

He skipped nimbly between square-jawed heroes and smiling, oily villains. He was, in many ways, the consummate character actor: always available, always working, always ready.

He made his first film in 1944 and shot his last earlier this year – a short entitled Drawback. In between were the likes of Death of a Salesman, The Misfits, Kansas City Bomber and Innerspace.

But for millions he will be remembered as Miles Bennell, the ordinary small-town MD who comes to the devastating conclusion that the good people of his quiet little backwater are being taken over by emotionless aliens in Don Siegel's seminal Fifties sci-fi chiller Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Now, as then, it is clear that Siegel's film – based on the short story Sleep No More by Jack Finney – is a thinly veiled allegory for the threat of Communism on 1950s' America. It is a masterwork of paranoid cinema and gave McCarthy a seat at the top table in the pantheon of unforgettable (and ground-breaking) science-fiction.

In his later years McCarthy was something of a totem for a new breed of directors who had grown up on Body Snatchers – such as adoring fan-turned-filmmaker Joe Dante, who used him in Piranha, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Innerspace and Matinee.

McCarthy was of the old school. He had known and acted with Marlon Brando. He was friends with Montgomery Clift. His collaborators included John Huston and Robert Altman. Even into his 90s he brought a touch of class to anything he chose to appear in.

On TV in the Seventies, he played Trigorin in a much lauded version of The Seagull. And on the stage he gave an uncanny portrayal of Harry S Truman in a one-man production, Give 'em Hell, Harry! Calling him an all-rounder doesn't do McCarthy justice at all. In fact, it's

an understatement.

So it must have felt strange to witness such a long and fulfilling career so utterly subsumed beneath one film and one role, which he resurrected in 1978 for Philip Kaufman's remake.

Yet McCarthy seemed to relish his association with Siegel's low-budget classic. It was the film everyone seemed to return to and the portrayal that hung around his shoulders like a mantle.

All actors yearn for a signature role. Kevin McCarthy found his in a desperate, wide-eyed young doctor suffocating under the weight of a dreadful, terrifying secret.

And if cinema genuinely offers a form of immortality, then Kevin McCarthy will live on as long as audiences want to be scared.