Harold Stone

Harold J. Stone, born Harold Hochstein on March 3, 1913, in New York City, was an American character actor whose career spanned stage, radio, film, and television. He died on November 18, 2005, at age 92, from natural causes at the Motion Picture and Television Retirement Home in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles.

Stone came from a Jewish acting family and was an only child. His stage debut came at age six, when he appeared alongside his father, Jacob Hochstein, in the play White Slaves. He later graduated from New York University and enrolled at the University of Buffalo to pursue a medical degree, but left school to support his mother and returned to acting. Throughout the 1930s he accumulated substantial stage experience before earning his first Broadway credits.

His Broadway career ran from 1939 into the early 1950s and included Morning Star in 1939, One Touch of Venus, A Bell for Adano in 1944, S.S. Glencairn in 1947, Stalag 17, and Apology, among other productions. Stone returned to Broadway in later decades as well, appearing in Abraham Cochrane in 1963, Charley's Aunt in 1970, and Ring Around the Bathtub in 1971.

Stone entered film with the 1946 Alan Ladd noir The Blue Dahlia. Subsequent screen roles included parts in The Harder They Fall opposite Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, and Somebody Up There Likes Me, all in 1956. He appeared in Spartacus in 1960, portrayed Frank Nitti in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1967, and had roles in The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965 and Hardly Working in 1980, among more than two dozen film credits across his career.

Television became an increasingly significant part of Stone's work beginning in 1949, when he co-starred on the short-lived live sitcom The Hartmans. He played Jake Goldberg in The Goldbergs and Lieutenant Hauser in The Walter Winchell File. He co-starred as a principal investigator in the syndicated series Grand Jury in 1959 and portrayed Hamilton Greeley in the NBC comedy My World and Welcome to It during the 1969–1970 season. He played Sam Steinberg on the CBS comedy Bridget Loves Bernie from 1972 to 1973 and had the role of Charlie on CBS's Joe and Sons from 1975 to 1976. Over the course of his television career, Stone made more than 150 guest appearances on series including Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, Hogan's Heroes, Hawaii Five-O, Barney Miller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and many others. In 1964, he received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for his work on the CBS dramatic series The Nurses.

Stone was married twice. His first wife, Jean, died in 1960, and he remarried in 1962 before separating from his second wife two years later. He had two sons and one daughter.