Hans Conried

Hans Georg Conried Jr. (April 15, 1917 – January 5, 1982) was an American actor and comedian. He was known for providing the voices of George Darling and Captain Hook in Walt Disney's Peter Pan (1953), Snidely Whiplash in Jay Ward's Dudley Do-Right cartoons, Professor Waldo P. Wigglesworth in Ward's Hoppity Hooper cartoons, was host of Ward's "Fractured Flickers" and Professor Kropotkin on the radio and film versions of My Friend Irma. He also appeared as Uncle Tonoose on Danny Thomas' sitcom Make Room for Daddy, and twice on I Love Lucy. Early life Conried was born on April 15, 1917, in Baltimore, Maryland to parents Edith Beryl (née Gildersleeve) and Hans Georg Conried. His Connecticut-born mother was a descendant of Pilgrims, and his father was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna, Austria. He was raised in Baltimore and in New York City. Career Conried studied acting at Columbia University and went on to play major classical roles onstage. This led him into radio in 1937, when he appeared in a supporting role in a broadcast of The Taming of the Shrew on KECA in Los Angeles, California. Four years later, a newspaper reported about his role on Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: "But at the mike, he's equally convincing as old men, drunks, dialeticians, or Shakesperean tragedians. Miss Hopper favors him for her dramatizations when the script will allow him, as she puts it, 'to have his head.'" Impressed with Conried's versatility, a scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed him as a character player in 1938. Conried's early screen roles were incidental bits, usually comic but sometimes shady or cowardly, depending on the context. He stayed with MGM until 1941, then began freelancing. His first major featured role was at Columbia Pictures as a worldly, architectural visionary who disrupted the household in Blondie's Blessed Event (1942). That established him as a comic figure in feature films. His Germanic surname got him cast as enemy agents in many wartime films, and he became a dialect specialist.