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Dennis Weaver has died at the age of eighty one. Many television fans will remember Weaver as Matt Dillon's first deputy, Chester on TV's Gunsmoke. Or from Weaver's own series McCloud, where he portrayed a cowboy sheriff who joins a big city police force. Maybe even as Clint Howard's TV dad on Gentle Ben. Genre fans are probably most familiar with Weaver as the protaganist in Stephen Spielberg's Duel, where he was chased down by a psychotic trucker. What you may not know is that Alfred Hitchcock was so taken by Weaver's performance as the creepy motel clerk in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil that it influenced his handling of Anthony Perkins' peformance in Psycho.