Hans Conried

Hans Georg Conried Jr. was born on April 15, 1917, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Edith Beryl Conried, née Gildersleeve, and Hans Georg Conried. His mother, born in Connecticut, was a descendant of Pilgrims, while his father was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna, Austria. Conried was raised in both Baltimore and New York City. He studied acting at Columbia University and went on to perform major classical stage roles before entering radio in 1937, when he appeared in a supporting capacity in a broadcast of The Taming of the Shrew on KECA in Los Angeles. A scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed him as a character player in 1938, impressed by his versatility, and Conried remained with the studio until 1941 before beginning to freelance.

His early screen appearances were small, often comic roles, though his Germanic surname led to frequent casting as enemy agents during wartime productions. His first major featured film role came at Columbia Pictures in Blondie's Blessed Event in 1942, in which he played a worldly architectural visionary who disrupts a household. During World War II, Conried enlisted in the U.S. Army in September 1944, training at Fort Knox as a tank crewman until his height made that assignment impractical. He subsequently served as a heavy mortar crewman before being sent to the Philippines as an engineer laborer, where fellow actor Jack Kruschen secured his reassignment to the Armed Forces Radio Network.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Conried maintained a substantial radio presence. He appeared in the regular cast of Orson Welles' Ceiling Unlimited, for which he also wrote the December 14, 1942, episode titled "War Workers." On The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, he played a psychiatrist whom George regularly consults, and he contributed various characters to The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. He was a regular on the CBS Radio program Life with Luigi as Schultz, a German classmate, and played occasional dialect roles on the detective series Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. He also appeared in eight radio performances of Cavalcade of America. His impeccable diction and distinctive voice made him well suited to pompous, scholarly, or mock-sinister characters, and he frequently appeared older than his actual age, often being cast as middle-aged or elderly figures.

On radio and later on film, Conried played Professor Kropotkin on My Friend Irma. When character actor Felix Bressart, cast as Kropotkin in the 1949 film version, died suddenly during production, Conried stepped in to complete the picture. Most of the finished film features Bressart with Conried's voice overdubbed, while Conried himself appears in a small number of scenes in identical costume and makeup. His first leading film role came in 1953 with the independent science fiction comedy The Twonky, and two years later he appeared as a riverboat gambler in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

Conried's association with children's author Theodor Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, began when Geisel hired him as the Japanese narrator for the documentary Design for Death in 1948, a film that won an Academy Award. Geisel subsequently cast Conried in the dominant role of the demanding piano teacher Dr. Terwilliker in the Technicolor fantasy The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. in 1953. Despite what Conried described in a 1970 interview with Leonard Maltin as one of the great money-losers in Hollywood history, the professional relationship between the two continued. Geisel cast Conried in three Dr. Seuss television specials, including the 1977 Halloween special Halloween is Grinch Night, produced by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, in which Conried voiced both the Narrator and the Grinch, a role Boris Karloff had originated in 1966. Conried was set to reprise the Grinch in The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat, but poor health prevented him from completing the work, and voice actor Bob Holt took over the role.

In animation, Conried is perhaps best remembered for voicing both Captain Hook and Mr. Darling in Walt Disney's Peter Pan in 1953, following the theatrical tradition of having the same performer play both roles. He also provided the storybook narration for MGM's Johann Mouse, the 1952 Academy Award winner for Best Short Subject in the Cartoons category and the seventh and last Oscar awarded to a Tom and Jerry short. He hosted several episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color as the Magic Mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and he posed live-action reference for King Stefan in Sleeping Beauty, though Taylor Holmes provided the character's voice in the final film. Conried became a charter member of the Jay Ward and Bill Scott stock company, voicing Snidely Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right segments of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Professor Waldo P. Wigglesworth on Hoppity Hooper, and serving as the live-action host of Fractured Flickers. He additionally voiced Wally Walrus on The Woody Woodpecker Show and Dr. Dred on Drak Pack.

On television, Conried made 19 guest appearances as Uncle Tonoose on Make Room for Daddy from 1955 to 1964, appearing on both ABC and CBS, along with four appearances as other characters on the same series. He appeared twice on I Love Lucy and was featured in the 1958 Omnibus episode "What Makes Opera Grand?", an analysis by Leonard Bernstein in which Conried played Marcello in a spoken dramatization of Act III of Puccini's La Bohème. He also portrayed the Mad Hatter in the 1959 production The Alphabet Conspiracy alongside Daws Butler, Dolores Starr, Stanley Adams, Francis Condie Baxter, and Cheryl Callaway.

On Broadway, Conried performed from 1953 to 1977. He starred in Something Old, Something New and in the musical 70, Girls, 70, and also appeared in Can-Can, the comedy Tall Story, and the musical Irene. Hans Conried died on January 5, 1982.