Leon Janney

Leon Janney (April 1, 1917 – October 28, 1980) was an American actor and radio personality born in Ogden, Utah, to Nathan Haines Janney and Bernice Rebecca Kohn. His mother had performed under the stage name Bernice Raymon or Ramon, and after relocating to Los Angeles to pursue more acting opportunities for her son, she gave him the stage name Laon Ramon. He later returned to using his birth name professionally, as documented in a March 1931 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Harold W. Cohen.

Janney's performing career began at age two, when he appeared before an audience at the Pantages Theatre in Ogden. He spent several years in vaudeville before making his first radio appearance in 1926, subsequently transitioning to legitimate theater. His film debut came in Victor Sjöström's The Wind, starring Lillian Gish, after which he appeared in a series of pictures portraying the boyhood versions of actors including Ricardo Cortez, Reginald Denny, and Conrad Nagel. Producer Hal Roach cast him as "Spud" in the Our Gang comedy Bear Shooters, though Roach determined Janney was too old to fit with the rest of the gang, making that his sole appearance as a Little Rascal. In 1931 he starred in the second film adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Sam. By the mid-1930s he was regarded as the quintessential male juvenile star and was earning more than $100,000 a year.

As he entered his teenage years, Janney shifted his focus toward radio, where he played all-American boy Richard Parker on the series The Parker Family. He also portrayed that character in an experimental NBC-TV broadcast of the program on May 9, 1941. Radio work allowed him to develop into a master dialectician, skilled in foreign accents and regional American dialects. He served in World War II as a translator, having learned to speak fluent Russian — a skill he had originally acquired to make his radio accents more authentic. During the 1948–1949 season on NBC-TV, he was one of the hosts of Stop Me If You've Heard This One, and he served as a panelist on ABC-TV's Think Fast during the 1949–1950 season.

On radio, Janney starred in the syndicated adventure series The Adventures of Dick Cole beginning in 1942 and portrayed Lee Chan on The Adventures of Charlie Chan. His other recurring radio roles included Paul Sherwood on Mr. Ace and Jane, Danny Stratford on The Life of Mary Sothern, Eddie McCoy on The Ethel Merman Show, and Chick Carter on Chick Carter, Boy Detective. He appeared in approximately 900 known episodes of the dramatic series Suspense between 1942 and 1962, as well as in episodes of The Mysterious Traveler and the science fiction series X Minus One. He starred in at least 80 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater from 1974 until his death in 1980, frequently playing multiple roles within a single episode by drawing on his ability to alter his voice rapidly. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he also performed voice-overs for hundreds of television commercials and public service announcements.

Despite being blacklisted from films during the 1950s red scare — a circumstance he considered ironic given that the Army had drafted him specifically for his Russian-language abilities — Janney continued working steadily in theater and radio. He appeared in bit roles on television programs including Car 54, Where Are You?, The Defenders, and The Jackie Gleason Show. He served as the spokesman for the New York Mets in Rheingold Beer commercials during the team's first two seasons in 1962 and 1963. In his later years he was a regular on the television series Another World and played two roles on The Edge of Night. He appeared in the 1968 film Charly alongside Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom, and that same year played Ed Gorton on the detective series Hawk.

Janney's Broadway career spanned from 1934 to 1969 and encompassed a wide range of productions. His earliest credits included Every Thursday (1934), Mulatto (1935), Parade (1935), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935), The Bough Breaks (1937), and Foreigners (1939). He appeared in the comedy Ghost for Sale in 1941 and returned to Broadway in the 1950s with productions including Madam, Will You Walk (1953), The Flowering Peach (1954), Threepenny Opera (1955), Measure for Measure (1957), A Shadow of My Enemy (1957), and The Gazebo (1958). His credits in the 1960s included A Call on Kuprin (1961), Venus at Large (1962), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), The Last Analysis (1964), Kelly (1965), and Three Men on a Horse (1969), in which he starred. He also starred in Damn Yankees during his Broadway career.

Beyond performing, Janney was elected to The Lambs in 1940 and served on the board of the Screen Actors Guild and the council of Actors' Equity Association. He was active in the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, serving as president of its New York local in 1963 and on that local's board. He also ran an unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of Bergen County, New Jersey, on a platform of abolishing the office. In his personal life, Janney married Jessica Pepper on March 26, 1936, in Armonk, New York; they divorced on August 4 of that year. At the time of his death he was married to his fourth wife, Dorothy, née Burbank. As an adult, Janney expressed regret over his years as a child actor, stating that he felt resentful toward his mother for pushing him into show business before he could walk and that he felt he had never had a childhood. He died of cancer on October 28, 1980, in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the age of 63.