This is a list of recurring fictional characters in the Mission: Impossible television series (1966–1973 and 1988–1990).

Overview Character Name Season(s) DatesLance, Steven, Written Out Of Television, Madison Books, 1996, pp. 282-284. Portrayed by Known special abilities Dan Briggs 1 September 17, 1966– April 22, 1967 Steven Hill Organization, leadership, role play, languages, hand-to-hand combat, voice mimicry, disguises Rollin Hand 1–3 September 17, 1966– April 20, 1969 Martin Landau Role play, languages, voice mimicry, disguises, sleight of hand, handwriting forgeries, ladies' man, hypnosis, fine mechanical skills such as watch repair and freehand key making, card sharp Cinnamon Carter 1–3 September 17, 1966– April 20, 1969 Barbara Bain Role play, languages, femme fatale, memory skills, astrology Barney Collier 1–7 and some 1988–1990 episodes September 17, 1966– September 8, 1973 Greg Morris Engineering, role play, languages, building infrastructure, hand-to-hand combat, film editing, skydiving, helicopter pilot, scuba diving, voice mimicry, singing Willy Armitage 1–7 September 17, 1966– September 8, 1973 Peter Lupus Physical strength, role play, languages, hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, custom construction, logistics, driving, procurement, scuba diving, card sharp, key making, long-distance swimming, motorcycling The Voice on Tape 1–7 and 1988–1990 September 17, 1966– September 8, 1973 Bob Johnson Jim Phelps 2–7 and 1988–1990 September 10, 1967– September 8, 1973 Peter Graves Organization, leadership, role play, languages, hand-to-hand combat, disguises, voice mimicry, scuba diving The Great Paris 4–5 September 28, 1969– March 17, 1971 Leonard Nimoy Role play, languages, voice mimicry, disguises, sleight of hand, ladies' man, hypnosis, card sharp The Hartford and Globe Repertory Companies 4 October 5, 1969– March 8, 1970 Multiple uncredited actors Basic role play, rapid large-scale custom construction Tracey 4 October 5, 1969– January 18, 1970 Lee Meriwether Role play Dana Lambert 5 September 19, 1970– March 17, 1971 Lesley Ann Warren Role play, femme fatale Dr. Douglas Robert (Lang) 5–6 October 3, 1970– September 25, 1971 Sam Elliott Medical knowledge and skills, role play, skydiving, helicopter pilot Lisa Casey 6–7 and one episode from 1988 to 1990 September 18, 1971– March 30, 1973 Lynda Day George Role play, femme fatale, disguises, voice mimicry, pickpocketing, stunt motorcycling Mimi Davis 7 September 16, 1972– November 18, 1972 Barbara Anderson Role play Nicholas Black 1988–1990 October 23, 1988– February 24, 1990 Thaao Penghlis Role play, Actor, makeup/disguise, visual effects, voice impersonation, mimicry Casey Randall 1988–1989 October 23, 1988– February 18, 1989 Terry Markwell Role play, Actor, makeup/disguise, voice impersonation, Designer, femme fatale, sharpshooter Max Harte 1988–1990 October 23, 1988– February 24, 1990 Tony Hamilton Strength, acting, role play, marksmanship, logistics, driving, pilot Grant Collier 1988–1990 October 23, 1988– February 24, 1990 Phil Morris Electronics, computers, sabotage, engineer Shannon Reed 1989–1990 February 18, 1989– February 24, 1990 Jane Badler Secret Service Agent, femme fatale, disguise, mimicry, role play

The cast changed considerably episode-by-episode throughout the program's seven-year run, so not all of the characters listed above took part in every mission that season. Many missions used one-time agents who were brought in as guest stars. Often, these agents were brought in for a specific skill, such as a pathologist, a psychic medium, or a contortionist.

Introduced in season one

Dan Briggs Daniel "Dan" Briggs’s main role in the team was as a Team Leader; he received the instructions from the 'Voice on Tape', and selected and coordinated the best people for the mission at hand. The team frequently consisted of Cinnamon Carter, Willy Armitage, Barney Collier, and Rollin Hand, although Briggs did not always use all of these team members and often also used other agents. He briefed the team, then if needed, handed out extra disguises or devices. Though Briggs played a significant role in many of the first-season missions, he was not an active participant in seven of the 27 missions he co-ordinated; after the mission briefings for these particular missions, Briggs did not join the team in the actual execution of the plan, evidently confident that his hand-picked team would succeed without his direct involvement.

As was the case with most characters in the series, Briggs's background and personal life were never explored in detail. The first mission of the series indicated that he had not worked with the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) for some time prior to that mission. (The 'Voice on Tape' ended the first mission's instructions with the statement, "I hope it's welcome back, Dan. It's been a while.") Another mission, "Old Man Out", revealed that he had once romanced an IMF agent played by Mary Ann Mobley. The only other insight into Briggs's personal life was his one off-book mission, "The Ransom", where the daughter of a personal friend of Briggs', a school teacher, is kidnapped to force Briggs to deliver a mob informant from police custody before he can testify before the grand jury.

Briggs was depicted at times as a cold, calculating character, quite willing to kill to complete a mission. Notably, he was the only member of the IMF shown personally killing a nontarget in anything other than self-defense, when he ambushed and killed a sentry to get through a checkpoint in "The Carriers". At other times, he exhibited a fatherlike attitude towards his agents, and was frequently seen smiling encouragement and patting shoulders as missions progressed. Several episodes, such as "Shock", revealed that Briggs had acting, voice mimicry, and disguise abilities similar to those of one of his agents, Rollin Hand.

At the start of the second season, James Phelps took over as lead of the IMF team, and no on-air explanation was offered for Briggs's disappearance. The real-life reason was that actor Steven Hill's Orthodox Jewish religious beliefs often conflicted with the shooting schedule, making it difficult for the production crew to meet deadlines. By mutual consent, his contract was not renewed for season two.White, Patrick J., The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier, Avon Books, 1991, pp. 60-61.

Rollin Hand Rollin Hand’s role as an IMF agent was that of an actor and disguise expert. In a theatrical brochure that headed his dossier, he was described as a quick-change artist and billed as "The Man of a Million Faces." As such, he had formidable skills in mimicry and voice imitation (introduced in the second season), as well as a mastery of make-up. He was also an expert at sleight of hand and pickpocketing, which came into play in several missions where he would pick pockets or hide things on someone else's person without their knowledge. His language and cultural skills were formidable. He regularly passed himself off as a citizen of various Latin American and Eastern European countries, and no one ever questioned his authenticity. He also successfully impersonated well-known public figures, such as the dictator of a fictitious Latin American country, rumored Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann and Adolf Hitler. On at least two missions, he even successfully impersonated a left-handed person, doing all gestures and reflexive actions left-handed when Rollin himself was right-handed. He successfully falsified a wide variety of maladies in the course of missions to dupe targets, including seizures and drug addiction.

His abilities as a "ladies' man" were instrumental to the success of a number of missions. On one occasion, his role led to him having romantic feelings for a target who was killed at the end of the mission. In several early episodes, a romantic attachment to Cinnamon Carter was hinted at, if never explicit. While he probably had the least expertise in hand-to-hand combat of the original men on the IMF team, he was regularly called upon to defend himself in it, and usually came out on top. He was skilled with handguns and capable of killing when necessary. Rollin also has displayed incredible endurance several times, as shown by being put under physical torture frequently. He was willing to do solo missions as well as help with personal off book missions for the IMF leader.

The character of Rollin Hand was created specifically for actor Martin Landau, and indeed, as Patrick J. White's book The Complete 'Mission: Impossible' Dossier pointed out, he was almost named "Martin Land". To achieve many of Rollin's acts of mimicry, several of the characters he imitated were either dubbed by Landau or played by him in a double role under heavy make-up. This technique is used prominently in the first episode of the series, where Landau plays a Castro-like dictator of a small island nation whom Rollin must impersonate during a national broadcast.

Cinnamon Carter

Cinnamon Carter’s role as an IMF agent was that of "femme fatale" and "woman in distress". In her IMF dossier, she was noted as being a successful model, and the dossier scenes during her three seasons on the show showed at least three different magazine covers on which she was featured. How a famous international cover model failed to be recognized as such during a mission was never explained. Carter was often used to play on the vanities of powerful men to get them to lower their defenses. Frequently, she played the role of a beautiful American woman on the make to draw the subject in. On occasion, she played a woman in distress to distract someone. Carter rarely adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, because Barbara Bain, the actress playing her, suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup. In a nod to Bain's condition, Carter, too, was shown to be claustrophobic. In "The Heir Apparent", she is made up as an aging princess, heir to a nation, while in "The Bunker", she is masked as the objective scientist's wife. In episodes where someone was needed to get into tight spaces, another female agent was brought in, but in "The Slave", Cinnamon, in spite of her claustrophobia, is seen being placed into and later coming out of the false bottom of a food carriage as part of the IMF plan. Cinnamon's claustrophobia was used against her in a devastating way in the third-season mission, "The Exchange", when an enemy intelligence service discovers her phobia after capturing her and uses it in an attempt to break her. While Cinnamon was being interrogated, she demonstrated that she had been trained in counter-interrogation techniques, resisting all attempts to get her to give up the team.

While Carter was rarely called upon to defend herself in hand-to-hand combat, she was shown to have at least the basic skills to disable a single adversary as evidenced in missions such as "Odds On Evil" and "The Town", and she was confident handling a gun. Like Rollin Hand, her assignments did, on rare occasions, lead to her falling for her target.

She was shown to have feelings for Rollin Hand in a conversation she had with "Crystal", a woman on one mission who had feelings for Dan Briggs, when Cinnamon brought up that Crystal was worried about Dan, who was with Rollin on a risky mission. Crystal replied that Cinnamon was just as worried about Rollin as Crystal was about Dan. Another time, in "The Pilot", where Rollin impersonates a man who has "a real reputation for being a ladies' man", and Cinnamon is supposed to come to his room, he asks her to help him "get in character".

Barbara Bain was married to Martin Landau at the time, and a contract dispute Landau had with the program's producers as the third season wound down resulted in both leaving the cast.

Barney Collier