Fritz Feld

Fritz Feld (October 15, 1900 – November 18, 1993) was a German-American actor born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. Over a career spanning seven decades, he accumulated credits in more than 140 films across both the silent and sound eras, as well as work in television and on Broadway.

Feld began his acting career in Germany in 1917, making his screen debut in Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl). His early work in the United States included touring with Morris Gest's production of The Miracle in the mid-1920s, and he appeared on Broadway in 1924 in The Miracle Man. He also filmed the sound sequences of Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929), released by Pathé, working without DeMille's direct supervision after DeMille had broken his contract with Pathé and moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Throughout his film career, Feld frequently portrayed maître d'hôtels, aristocrats, and eccentrics. Among his notable roles was Dr. Lehman in the 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, and the small part of French orchestra conductor Jardinet alongside the Marx Brothers in At the Circus (1939). He appeared in nine films with Jerry Lewis between 1954 and 1970, and also worked with Lewis and Dean Martin on their television program The Colgate Comedy Hour. He portrayed one of the Harmonia Gardens waiters in Hello, Dolly! (1969), and in his later years appeared in several Walt Disney films as well as taking an uncharacteristically dramatic role in Barfly.

Feld developed a signature physical comedy device: slapping his palm against his mouth to produce a popping sound that conveyed both superiority and annoyance. The first recorded use of this trademark was in the 1948 film If You Knew Susie.

His television work included numerous guest appearances across various series. On Lost in Space, he played the recurring character Zumdish, the manager of the intergalactic Celestial Department Store, appearing in two season-two episodes — "The Android Machine" and "The Toymaker" — and returning in the season-three episode "Two Weeks in Space." In a 1967 episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. titled "The Napoleon's Tomb Affair," he played four distinct characters: a banker, a beatnik, a diplomat, and a waiter. Feld made his final film appearance in 1989.

Outside of his professional work, Feld was a capable amateur chess player; 1948 U.S. champion Herman Steiner and international master George Koltanowski were known to visit his home in the 1940s for sessions that lasted until six in the morning, a detail recorded in The Bobby Fischer I Knew and Other Stories (Denker & Parr, 1995).

Feld married actress Virginia Christine, who was twenty years his junior and widely recognized for her role as "Mrs. Olson" in Folgers coffee television commercials. They married in 1940, had a son, Steven Anatol Feld, born in 1945, and remained married until Feld's death in 1993 in a convalescent home in Los Angeles, California. Christine died in 1996. Both are interred at the Jewish Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles.