Louis Sorin

Louis Sorin (September 23, 1893 – December 14, 1961) was a New York-born actor whose career spanned stage, screen, radio, and television across four decades. He appeared in more than twenty Broadway productions between 1923 and 1952, among them The Madwoman of Chaillot, Me and Molly, Swan Song, Sophie, Collector's Item, and the original stage production of Animal Crackers, in which he originated the role of art patron Roscoe W. Chandler. His work was concentrated almost entirely in New York, and he frequently took on dialect roles, often employing a Jewish accent.

Sorin's film career grew directly out of his stage work. Paramount Pictures cast him in the 1929 musical revue Glorifying the American Girl, where he and Eddie Cantor appeared together as two opportunistic tailors in a comedy sketch. The following year, Paramount brought him back to re-create his Broadway role of Roscoe W. Chandler in the film adaptation of Animal Crackers alongside the Marx Brothers. His sole feature-film credit of the 1930s beyond those Paramount productions was Moonlight and Pretzels (1933), a low-budget musical produced by Universal Pictures in New York on a budget of $100,000. In January 1931, showman Sid Grauman brought the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart satire Once in a Lifetime to Los Angeles, and Sorin appeared in that production alongside Aline MacMahon and Russell Hopton. By 1937 he was making two-reel comedies for the New York-based Educational Pictures studio, working opposite comedy performers Bert Lahr and Willie Howard in dialect roles. Educational Pictures discontinued production in 1938, ending that chapter of his film work.

The 1940s brought Sorin into radio and documentary film. From 1942 to 1945 he portrayed Pancho on the radio series The Cisco Kid. In 1943 he participated in Seeds of Freedom, a New York-produced wartime film that combined the 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin with newsreel footage; Sorin joined radio actors Junius Matthews and Aline MacMahon in supplying spoken dialogue to the silent sequences. Also in 1950, he appeared alongside Sam Levene and Arlene Francis in With These Hands, an industrial film produced at the Fox Movietone studio in New York and sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which dramatized the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911.

Television, centered in New York and broadcast live in its early years, gave Sorin a substantial new platform beginning in 1950. He appeared in a 1950 television adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep with Zachary Scott, a 1954 United States Steel Hour production of Elmer Rice's The Grand Tour, and a 1955 Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of Rice's Dream Girl, which starred Vivian Blaine and Hal March. He also took on lead roles in two 1951 playlets: in A Little Night Music he played an immigrant barber whose passion for music pushes his family toward tragedy, and in The Golden Crown he starred in an installment of Anna May Wong's dramatic series for the DuMont Network, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong. He was additionally featured as Cousin Simon on NBC's comedy series The Goldbergs. Sorin is also recognized by later audiences for his appearance as Mr. Manicotti in the 1956 Honeymooners episode Mama Loves Mambo. His final performance was in an episode of the Naked City television series, which aired on December 13, 1961, the night before his death on December 14, 1961.