Mason Adams

Mason Adams, born Mason Abrams on February 26, 1919, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American actor whose career spanned stage, radio, television, and film. He grew up in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father, Morris Abrams, had emigrated from Russia and operated a company manufacturing machinery and factory tools, and his mother, the former Freda Sugarman, was also a Russian immigrant. Adams pursued his education at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a bachelor's degree in theater and speech in 1940 and a master's degree in theater arts in 1941. He subsequently trained at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he also taught speech. His stage career began in 1940 with summer stock performances at Baltimore's Hilltop Theater.

Adams maintained a Broadway presence spanning from 1943 to 2002, appearing in productions that included the drama Public Relations, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, the drama A Shadow of My Enemy, the play Inquest, and Checking Out, the last of which featured him in its original 1976 cast. His stage work was complemented by extensive activity in other performance mediums throughout his career.

During radio's golden age, Adams was a prominent presence across numerous programs. Among his recurring roles was Pepper Young in Pepper Young's Family, which aired from 1947 to 1959, and he portrayed the Nazi villain Atom Man in a 1945 serial on the radio version of The Adventures of Superman. He appeared across a wide range of radio series, including The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Big Sister, Big Town, CBS Radio Mystery Theater, The Crime Club, Gasoline Alley, Grand Central Station, Inner Sanctum, Nick Carter Master Detective, Suspense, X Minus One, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, and others. He also played Corporal Eddie in a series of public-announcement programs for the U.S. Army. One of his radio performances, the role of Mack in the Grand Central Station episode "Miracle for Christmas," became a recurring holiday broadcast repeated for six years and is regarded as a classic of the Radio Golden Era. In 1963, he served as lead voice on a comedy recording called "The Chickens Are in the Chimes," issued by RCA Victor on a 45 rpm record by Sascha Burland and the Skipjack Choir, which became a recurring holiday radio favorite.

From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Adams was also extensively employed as a voiceover artist for television commercials, lending his voice to campaigns for products including Chiffon margarine, Crest toothpaste, French's food products, and Smucker's preserves. He returned to commercial voiceover work in the 1980s and 1990s, providing the voice for Cadbury's Creme Eggs advertisements, as well as commercials for Sherwin-Williams Paints, the Salvation Army, Kix cereal, Dentyne, Swanson, and a 1986 Lysol spot. He also served as announcer for a 1992 WCBS-TV news promotion. In the early 1990s, he narrated Frontiers of Flight, a Discovery Channel series on milestones in aviation.

During the 1970s, Adams was a co-star on the NBC soap opera Another World before landing the role most closely associated with his television career: Managing Editor Charlie Hume on the CBS drama Lou Grant, which ran from 1977 to 1982. He appeared throughout the series' entire run and received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, in 1979, 1980, and 1981, each time alongside co-star Robert Walden, who played reporter Joe Rossi. During this same period he appeared in television films including The Deadliest Season in 1977, Revenge of the Stepford Wives in 1980, and The Kid with the Broken Halo in 1982.

On the feature film side, Adams played the U.S. president in Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1981 and starred as Colonel Edward Mason in the 1986 film F/X, alongside Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy. He appeared in the 1991 action film Toy Soldiers, played Walter Warner Sr. in the 1993 comedy Son in Law starring Pauly Shore, and had roles in Houseguest in 1995, Touch in 1997, and The Lesser Evil in 1998. In the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, he portrayed Senator Clinton P. Anderson. His final screen role came in the series finale of Oz.

In 1983, Adams joined The Mirror Theater Ltd's repertory company for its inaugural season, performing in Paradise Lost, Rain, Inheritors, and The Hasty Heart. The season began off-off-Broadway at the Real Stage Acting School before transferring off-Broadway to the Theatre at St. Peter's Church. In the 1990s, he narrated audiobook recordings of several Lilian Jackson Braun mysteries and a Mary Higgins Clark audiobook.

Adams was the older brother of Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, a radiologist involved in founding International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. In 1958, Adams married Margot Fineberg; the couple had a daughter, Betsy, and a son, Bill. Adams died on April 26, 2005, from natural causes.