Sam Buffington (October 12, 1931 – May 15, 1960)[1] was an American actor whose short career included performances on stage, radio, film, and television.

[5] He was born in Swansea, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children for Carl Buffington, a lumber company manager, and Annette Gendron.

[7] At age 18, Buffington appears as a roomer in a Brookline, Massachusetts, boarding house during 1950,[8] when he was attending the Leland Powers School of Radio and Theater.

[10] Buffington's first known professional stage credits come from summer stock with the Allegheny Players at the Mishler Theatre in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

[11] After the Mishler run completed, the Allegheny Players performed for a week in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, where Buffington had the male lead in a comedy.

[15] For the film Damn Citizen, a reviewer said "Sam Buffington does a splendid job of making himself thoroughly unpleasant in the role of a gambling casino operator".

[citation needed] While filming an episode of The Gray Ghost, Buffington had asked Lillian Buyeff how she had gotten a gig on the radio drama Suspense.

[29] This half-hour western series made at Revue Studios for NBC starred Audie Murphy and Guy Mitchell as frontier detectives for the Denver Police Department, c. 1870.

[32] While Buffington's wife Pat was in Palm Springs, California, he wrote a note to her, locked himself in the bathroom, sealed air passages under the door and window, and turned on a gas jet.

The UPI story, with a West Hollywood dateline, cited alternatively police and sheriff's detectives as the source,[34][35] but was carried by only one out-of-state newspaper.

[citation needed] When a year had passed, and Whispering Smith was finally set to debut on NBC television, newspaper announcements made only a brief reference to "the late Sam Buffington, who died after only 20 episodes were filmed".