Harold J. Stone

Harold J. Stone (born Harold Hochstein, March 3, 1913November 18, 2005) was an American stage, radio, film, and television character actor. Early life and stage career Stone was born to a Jewish acting family. At age six, Stone debuted on stage with his father, Jacob Hochstein, in the play White Slaves. A graduate of New York University, he attended the University of Buffalo to study medicine, but he soon altered those career plans and decided, instead, to become an actor to support his mother. After gaining considerable acting experience in various plays during the 1930s, Stone was finally cast on Broadway, where between 1939 and the early 1950s, he appeared in a series of critically acclaimed productions such as One Touch of Venus and Stalag 17. Some of his other Broadway credits include Morning Star (1939), A Bell for Adano (1944), S.S. Glencairn (1947), Abraham Cochrane (1963), Charley's Aunt (1970), and Ring Around the Bathtub (1971). Later in his career, after working extensively in films and television, Stone periodically returned to the stage, where in the 1960s and 1970s, he also directed several off-Broadway and Broadway productions, including Ernest in Love and Charley's Aunt. Film and television Stone made his motion-picture debut in the Alan Ladd film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946). He then went on to work in small but memorable roles in such films as The Harder They Fall (1956) with Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), The Garment Jungle (1957), The Invisible Boy (1957), Spartacus (1960), The Chapman Report (1962), X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Girl Happy (1965), The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967, as Frank Nitti), The Big Mouth (1967), the Danish film The Olsen Gang in a Fix (1969), The Seven Minutes (1971), Mitchell (1975), and Hardly Working (1980).