Everett Sloane

Everett Sloane
in The Enforcer (1951)
Born	(1909-10-01)October 1, 1909 Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Died	August 6, 1965(1965-08-06) (aged 55) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place	Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery
Occupation	Actor, songwriter, theatre director
Years active	1935–1965
Spouse(s)	Lillian Herman (1933-1965; his death; 2 children)

Everett Sloane (October 1, 1909 – August 6, 1965) was an American stage, film and television actor, songwriter, voice actor and theatre director.

Early life

Born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York, Sloane attended the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out in order to join a theater company, but he stopped acting and became a runner on Wall Street after a number of negative stage reviews. After the stock market crash in 1929, he decided to return to the theater.

Career

Sloane eventually joined Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and acted in Welles's films in roles such as Citizen Kane 's Bernstein in 1941 and The Lady from Shanghai's Arthur Bannister in 1947. He was memorable as a hired assassin in Renaissance Italy opposite Welles's Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes (1949).

One of Sloane's most memorable performances was as a doctor for paraplegic World War II veterans in the 1950 film The Men with Marlon Brando (in his film debut).

Sloane's Broadway theater career began with the comedy Boy Meets Girl in 1945 and ended in 1960 with From A to Z, a revue for which he wrote several songs. In between, he acted in plays such as Native Son (1941), A Bell for Adano (1944), and Room Service (1953), and directed the melodrama The Dancer (1946).

In the 1940s, Sloane was a frequent guest star on the radio theater series Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Shadow (as comic relief Shrevie, the cab driver, among other roles), and was in The Mysterious Traveler episode "Survival of the Fittest" with Kermit Murdock. In 1953, he starred as Captain Frank Kennelly in the CBS radio crime drama 21st Precinct. In 1957, he co-starred in the ninth episode of Suspicion co-starring Audie Murphy and Jack Warden. In 1958, he played Walter Brennan's role in a remake of To Have and Have Not called The Gun Runners.

Sloane also worked extensively in television; in November 1955 he starred in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Our Cook's A Treasure"; he appeared on the NBC anthology series The Joseph Cotten Show, also known as On Trial, in the 1956 episode "Law Is for the Lovers", with co-star Inger Stevens.

In "The Ratman" (March 7, 1959) episode of NBC's Cimarron City, starring John Smith, Sloane plays a brilliant German-born physician, Hans J. Eckhardt, who tries to alert the town to the danger of bubonic plague, which he had first detected on a nearby riverboat. The townspeople shun the doctor with the strange demeanor and accent, but he advances the since-proved theory that a flea on rats carries the plague. Twelve townspeople, including Eckhardt, die in the epidemic.^[1]

Later that same year, Sloane appeared as a guest in the premiere episode "Stage Stop" of John Smith's second NBC western series, Laramie. "Stage Stop" explains how series characters Jess Harper (Robert Fuller and Slim Sherman (John Smith) became ranch partners. Jess arrives in Wyoming from Texas in search of an erstwhile "friend", Pete Morgan, played by John Mitchum, who had robbed him. Morgan is part of the gang led by Bud Carlin, played by Dan Duryea. The gang captures Judge Thomas J. Wilkens, portrayed by Sloane, to keep him from trying Morgan. At first unfriendly toward each other, Slim and Jess must fight together when Carlin shows up at Sherman's relay station, where the outlaw proceeds to humiliate the judge.^[2]

In the early 1960s, Sloane did the voice of the title character of The Dick Tracy Show in 130 cartoons. Beginning in 1964, he provided character voices for the animated TV series The Adventures of Jonny Quest. He also starred in the episode "Hot Line" on the ABC sci-fi television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He wrote the unused lyrics to "The Fishin' Hole", the theme song for The Andy Griffith Show. Sloane guest starred on the show in 1962, playing Jubal Foster in the episode "The Keeper of the Flame". He starred as the ruthless businessman in both the film and television versions of Rod Serling's Patterns, and in the first season of The Twilight Zone guest starred in "The Fever" as the victim of a Las Vegas slot machine. He guest starred as a San Francisco prosecuting attorney in the 1962 episode of Perry Mason, "The Case of the Poison Pen Pal".

Sloane also appeared in Walt Disney's Zorro series in 1957–1958 as Andres Felipe Basilio, in the "Man from Spain" episodes.

Admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald will long remember Sloane's renditions of passages from The Great Gatsby on the NBC program devoted to Fitzgerald in August 1955, part of the "Biography in Sound" series on great American authors.

Death

Sloane committed suicide on August 6, 1965, reportedly depressed over oncoming blindness by glaucoma; he was 55 years old. He is buried at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Partial filmography

• Citizen Kane (1941)
• Journey into Fear (1943)
• The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
• Prince of Foxes (1949)
• The Men (1950)
• The Enforcer (1951)
• Sirocco (1951)
• The Sellout (1952)
• Way of a Gaucho (1952)
• The Big Knife (1955)
• Lust for Life (1956)
• Patterns (1956)
• Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
• The Gun Runners (1958)
• Home from the Hill (1960)
• Brushfire! (1962)
• The Disorderly Orderly (1964)
• The Patsy (1964)

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Everett Sloane.

• Everett Sloane at the Internet Broadway Database
• Everett Sloane at the Internet Movie Database
• Everett Sloane at AllRovi
• Everett Sloane at the TCM Movie Database
• Sloane on The Andy Griffith Show
• Everett Sloane at Find a Grave
• Literature on Everett Sloane