J. Carrol Naish

J. Carrol Naish (January 21, 1896 – January 24, 1973) was an American character actor. He was twice nominated for an Academy Award for film roles, and he later found fame in the title role of CBS Radio's Life With Luigi (1948–1953), which was also on CBS Television (1952–1953).

Born Joseph Patrick Carroll Naish in New York City, he appeared on stage for several years before he began his film career. He began as a member of Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe of child performers. In Paris after World War I, Naish formed his own song and dance act. He was traveling the globe from Europe to Egypt to Asia, when his China-bound ship developed engine problems, leaving him in California in 1926.

His uncredited bit role in What Price Glory? (1926) launched his career in more than two hundred films. He was twice nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the first for his role in the movie Sahara (1943), and for his performance in the movie A Medal for Benny (1945). For the latter film, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. He played Boris Karloff's assistant in House of Frankenstein (1944).

He was of Irish descent, but he never used his dialect skills to play Irishmen (Naish did however play real life Irish-American Philip Sheridan in John Ford's Rio Grande), explaining, "When the part of an Irishman comes along, nobody ever thinks of me." He did play other ethnicities such as Italian, Native American, and Chinese, which earned him the moniker "Hollywood's one-man U.N.".

In 1954, Naish guest starred in an episode of Justice, an NBC legal drama about attorneys of the Legal Aid Society of New York. On December 13, 1958, Naish appeared as Rare Crowder in "The Bloodline" of NBC's Cimarron City. On February 2, 1959, Naish appeared on John Payne's NBC western series The Restless Gun in the role of Major Quint Langley in the episode "Blood of Courage."

In 1960-61, he played an American Indian in the ABC sitcom Guestward, Ho! with costars Joanne Dru and Mark Miller.

By 1971, he appeared in his final film role, Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), as a mad scientist; a role descended from the original Dr. Frankenstein takes to murdering young women for experimentation in hopes of reviving his ancestor's creation, with help from his mute assistant, played by Lon Chaney Jr., whose film appearance, was also his last. Chaney died in July 1973, just 6 months after Naish.