Career Highlights: Citizen Kane, Patterns, The Lady from Shanghai
First Major Screen Credit: Citizen Kane (1941)
Biography
Manhattan-born Everett Sloane first set foot on-stage at age seven, in the role of Puck in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At 18, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to join a stock company. Poor reviews convinced Sloane that his future did not lie in the theater, so he secured a job as a Wall Street runner -- only to return to acting after the 1929 crash. He went into radio, playing anything and everything (he was the standard voice of Adolph Hitler on "The March of Time"), then made his Broadway bow with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. Welles brought Sloane to Hollywood in 1940 to play the wizened Mr. Bernstein in the cinema classic Citizen Kane; Sloane remained a Mercury associate until 1947, when he played the crippled attorney Bannister in Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Outside of the Welles orbit, Sloane was seen in the 1944 Broadway hit A Bell for Adano, and starred as the ruthless business executive in both the television and screen versions of Rod Serling's Patterns. Sloane's additional TV work included a 39-week starring stint on the syndicated series Official Detective, the voice of Dick Tracy in a batch of 130 cartoons produced in 1960 and 1961, and several episodic-TV directorial credits. Reportedly depressed over his encroaching blindness, Everett Sloane committed suicide at the age of 55. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York, Sloane attended the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out in order to join a theater company, but he stopped acting and became a runner on Wall Street after a number of negative stage reviews. After the stock market crash in 1929, he decided to return to the theater.
Sloane also worked extensively in television; in November 1955 he starred in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Our Cook's A Treasure"; he appeared on the NBCanthology series, The Joseph Cotten Show, in the 1956 episode "Law Is for the Lovers", with co-star Inger Stevens. Sloane was the voice of Dick Tracy in 130 cartoons produced in 1960 and 1961. Beginning in 1964, he provided character voices for the animated TV series The Adventures of Jonny Quest. He wrote the unused lyrics to "The Fishin' Hole", the theme song for The Andy Griffith Show. He starred as the ruthless businessman in both the film and television versions of Rod Serling's Patterns, and later guest starred in the first season of The Twilight Zone as the victim of a Las Vegas Slot Machine.