Byron Foulger

Character actor Byron Foulger's familiar face was seen in over 450 feature films and TV series across his lengthy and fruitful screen career, most notably in the 1940s as part of acclaimed director Preston Sturges' core acting troupe. After cutting his teeth on Broadway and in radio appearances, Foulger began acting on screen in the late 1930s. With a knack for characterizations of whiny, shifty, mealy-mouthed supporting characters, he landed parts in many features before finding himself in Sturges' gang of stock character actors. Throughout the 1940s he appeared in five of the director's features, including the instant-classic Hollywood satire "Sullivan's Travels." Though he was a minor player in these bigger-budget Hollywood productions, he found meatier roles in lesser pictures like the B horror flick "The Man They Could Not Hang." In the 1950s he began to appear on television, with small character arcs and one-off appearances on dozens of series. Shopkeepers, businessmen, bank tellers--these sorts of mild-mannered, minor-but-necessary parts were his forte. In 1957 director William Beaudine playfully cast him against type as the Devil himself in the Bowery Boys comedy "Up in Smoke." As television grew in popularity, so did Foulger, who worked on the small screen with recurring parts on "Dennis the Menace," "Lassie," and, in one of his last performances, the role of train engineer Wendell Gibbs on long-running sitcom "Petticoat Junction." Foulger died of heart problems at the age of 70.