Everett Sloane - Biography

Everett Sloane (October 1, 1909 – August 6, 1965) was an American stage, film and television actor, songwriter, 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 1948. He was memorable as a hired assassin in Renaissance Italy opposite Welles's Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes (1949).

Sloane's Broadway theater career began with the comedy Boy Meets Girl in 1945 and ended with From A to Z, a revue for which he wrote several songs, in 1960. 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 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 in the 1956 episode "Law Is for the Lovers", with co-star Inger Stevens. Sloane was the voice of the title character of The Dick Tracy Show in 130 cartoons produced in the early 1960s. Beginning in 1964, he provided character voices for the animated TV series The Adventures of Jonny Quest. 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.

Sloane also appeared in the Disney Zorro series in 1957–58 as Andres Felipe Basilio, in the "Man from Spain" episodes.

Admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald will long remember his magnificent 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 at the age of 55, reportedly depressed over oncoming blindness by glaucoma. 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 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)

External links

• Sloane on The Andy Griffith Show
• Brief Sloane biography