Byron Foulger - Career

Career

Foulger attended the University of Utah, and started acting through his participation in community theatre. He made his Broadway debut in March 1920 in a production of Medea featuring Moroni Olsen, and performed in four more productions with Olsen on the 'Great White Way', back-to-back, ending in April 1922. He then toured with Olsen's stock company, and ended up at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he both acted and directed.

Foulger made his first films in 1934 and 1936 – The Little Minister and The President's Mystery, the latter based on a story by Franklin Delano Roosevelt – but his career didn't start in earnest until 1937, after he performed opposite Mae West in a racy 'Adam and Eve' sketch on the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy network radio program which resulted in West being banned from the airwaves almost immediately. (Foulger played the voice of the serpent). From this point on, Foulger worked steadily in motion pictures.

He played many parts: storekeepers, hotel desk clerks, morticians, professors, bank tellers, ministers, confidence men, and a host of other characterizations, usually whining, weak-willed, shifty, sanctimonious or sycophantic. His earliest films show him clean-shaven, but in the 1940s he adopted a wispy moustache that emphasized his characters' worried manner. Foulger was a resourceful actor and often embellished his scripted lines with memorable bits of business: in The Falcon Strikes Back, for example, hotel clerk Foulger announces a homicide by bellowing across the lobby: "Mur-der! Mur-der!'

In real life, Foulger was not as much of a pushover as the characters he played. In one memorable incident at a party he threatened to punch Errol Flynn for flirting with his wife, the actress Dorothy Adams, with whom he was married from 1921 until his death in 1970.

In the 1940s, Foulger was part of Preston Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors, appearing in five films written by Sturges, The Great McGinty, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (recreating the role of McGinty's secretary he played in The Great McGinty) and The Great Moment. In "A" pictures, such as those of Sturges', Foulger would often not receive a screen credit: in B movies such as 1939's The Man They Could Not Hang, he would get more substantial billed parts.

By the late 1950s, Foulger was so well established as a mild-mannered worrywart for a mere showing of his features on screen to receive a welcoming audience laugh (this happens in the cameo-laden Frank Capra comedy Pocketful of Miracles). In a humorous coup, the actor was cast against type for the most prominent role of his career: playing the Devil opposite The Bowery Boys in Up in Smoke, and was billed in ads and posters as one of the film's three stars.

Beginning in 1950, Foulger made over 90 appearances on television, in programs such as Death Valley Days, I Love Lucy, The Cisco Kid, My Little Margie, The Man Behind the Badge, The Lone Ranger, Maverick, Lawman, The Red Skelton Show, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Bonanza, Burke's Law, Daniel Boone, Perry Mason, Laredo and Gunsmoke. He played multiple-episode characters on Dennis the Menace ("Mr. Timberlake"), Lassie ("Dan Porter") and The Andy Griffith Show ("Fred, the hotel clerk"). On Petticoat Junction he played two recurring roles: "Mr. Guerney" and engineer "Wendell Gibbs".

Notable later television credits included the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance" – in which Gig Young tells Foulger, who is playing a drugstore counterman, that he thinks he's seen him before, to which Foulger replies: "I've got that kind of face" – the short-lived 1967 series Captain Nice, and The Mod Squad, his last appearance in episodic television.