Harold Huber

Harold Huber, born Harold Joseph Huberman on December 5, 1909, in the Bronx, New York, was an American actor whose career spanned stage, film, radio, and television. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Imperial Russia who had come to the United States as infants, and his father worked as the manager of an optical firm. Huber died on September 29, 1959, following surgery at Jewish Memorial Hospital, and was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens. He was survived by his wife, Ethel, and daughter, Margaret.

Huber enrolled at New York University in the fall of 1925 at the age of sixteen, where he participated in the university debate team and eventually served as editor of a student magazine called The Medley. His editorship drew public attention in May 1928 when the university administration suspended the publication for printing material it deemed "low humor...not fit to bear the name of New York University." After receiving his degree from NYU in 1929, he briefly attended Columbia University, reportedly in the School of Law, before his first acting opportunity led him away from legal studies.

That first acting job came on September 22, 1930, when Harold Huberman adopted the professional name Harold Huber for a Broadway adaptation of A Farewell to Arms, a production that ran for approximately one month. His Broadway career, which extended from 1930 to 1945, also included First Night, which opened later in 1930, the play Two Seconds in 1931, the musical Merry-Go-Round in 1932, and The Assassin in 1945. His final stage appearance came in September 1958, when he co-starred with Eva Gabor in an off-Broadway revival of Frank Wedekind's Lulu.

Following his early Broadway work, Huber transitioned to film after landing roles in Warner Bros. productions shot in New York. He made his film debut in Central Park in late 1932 and quickly followed with a bit part in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, he appeared in nearly 100 films. An early notable role was the stool-pigeon Nunnheim in The Thin Man in 1934. Huber frequently took on parts requiring different accents and ethnicities, including a Japanese American character named Ito Nakamura in Little Tokyo, U.S.A. in 1942. He appeared in multiple Charlie Chan films in varied national roles: an American in Charlie Chan on Broadway and a French officer in Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, both in 1937, a French officer again in Charlie Chan in City in Darkness in 1939, and a Brazilian in Charlie Chan in Rio in 1941. He also played a supporting role as a member of the French Foreign Legion in Beau Geste in 1939, and had appearances in films featuring Mr. Moto and Charlie McCarthy.

On radio, Huber starred as Hercule Poirot in The Adventures of M. Hercule Poirot, a weekly half-hour program that ran from February to October 1945, with Agatha Christie herself introducing the first broadcast via shortwave radio. Beginning in October 1946, he continued in the role for a year-long daily fifteen-minute program on CBS called Mystery of the Week, with scripts written by Alfred Bester. He also portrayed Fu Manchu in an eponymous radio program.

Huber made his television debut in 1950 as the star of I Cover Times Square, a weekly half-hour drama on ABC in which he played Johnny Warren, a nationally known newspaper and radio columnist. He also served as a producer on the New York-made series, which lasted one season. Among his final television credits were two episodes of The Phil Silvers Show, aired in November 1958 and February 1959.