Everett Sloane

Manhattan-born Everett Sloane first set foot on-stage at age seven, in the role of Puck in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At 18, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to join a stock company. Poor reviews convinced Sloane that his future did not lie in the theater, so he secured a job as a Wall Street runner -- only to return to acting after the 1929 crash. He went into radio, playing anything and everything (he was the standard voice of Adolph Hitler on "The March of Time"), then made his Broadway bow with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. Welles brought Sloane to Hollywood in 1940 to play the wizened Mr. Bernstein in the cinema classic Citizen Kane; Sloane remained a Mercury associate until 1947, when he played the crippled attorney Bannister in Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Outside of the Welles orbit, Sloane was seen in the 1944 Broadway hit A Bell for Adano, and starred as the ruthless business executive in both the television and screen versions of Rod Serling's Patterns. Sloane's additional TV work included a 39-week starring stint on the syndicated series Official Detective, the voice of Dick Tracy in a batch of 130 cartoons produced in 1960 and 1961, and several episodic-TV directorial credits. Reportedly depressed over his encroaching blindness, Everett Sloane committed suicide at the age of 55.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide