Jonathan Hole

Jonathan Foreman Hole (August 13, 1904 – February 11, 1998) was an American actor born in Eldora, Iowa, to Mr. and Mrs. H. E. Hole. He completed his secondary education at North High School in Des Moines and went on to attend Drake University. Over a career spanning 65 years, Hole worked across five entertainment genres: vaudeville, stage, radio, film, and television.

Hole began his professional life in vaudeville during the 1920s before transitioning to legitimate theater. His New York stage work ran from 1924 to 1934 and included appearances in the play Lost Horizons, the play The Locked Room, The Little Black Book, the revue Chamberlain Brown's Scrap Book, and the play Peter Flies High. In 1926, he took on the role of stage manager with the Morgan Wallace players at the Princess Theater in Des Moines. By the close of 1929, he had also performed with stock companies in Brooklyn, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Lynn, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine. In 1930, he appeared in Cinderelative, a comedy written by Dorothy Heyward.

Radio represented another significant dimension of Hole's career. He worked as a performer in Iowa, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. While employed as an announcer at WBBM in Chicago, the station temporarily changed his surname to Cole. He portrayed Paul Henderson on the radio soap opera Ma Perkins, and in 1942 he served as co-chair of the Red Cross entertainment committee on war relief in Chicago.

Hole's film career began in 1951 with a role in Two-Dollar Bettor, a vehicle starring Marie Windsor and Steve Brodie. He went on to appear in thirty-six feature-length films, most often without screen credit. His film appearances included A Man Called Peter in 1955, Beloved Infidel in 1959, 4 for Texas in 1963, and The Graduate in 1967. During his early years in Hollywood, he held a day job at the California Employment Development Department.

Television became the most prolific arena of Hole's later career. His first television appearance came in 1951 on Hollywood Theatre Time, in the episode Mr. Young's Sprouts, which starred Gale Storm and Don DeFore. Over the course of his television work, he accumulated 200 appearances across 121 shows and made-for-television movies. He appeared seven times each in Dragnet, Burke's Law, and Green Acres, five times in Maverick, and five times on CBS's Perry Mason. He had two appearances on ABC's The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp with Hugh O'Brian and appeared in episodes 5 and 48 of Batman. On The Real McCoys, he twice played the recurring character Elmer Clark alongside Walter Brennan, and he guest starred on The Andy Griffith Show as Orville Monroe, the undertaker. He frequently portrayed fussy clerks, managers, and minor bureaucrats in comic roles. His final television appearance was in the 1990 murder mystery Silhouette, starring Faye Dunaway.

On April 7, 1931, Hole married actress Elizabeth Jane Hanawalt, known professionally as Betty Hanna, in Manhattan. The two had met while performing together in Dayton, Ohio. She was born in 1903 and died in 1976. Hole died in North Hollywood on February 11, 1998, at the age of 93, and is buried alongside his wife at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.