George E. Stone (born George Lichtenstein May 18, 1903 in Łódź, Congress Poland - d. May 26, 1967 in California) was a character actor in movies, radio, and television.
Stone's slight build and very expressive face first attracted attention in 1927, in the popular silent-film romance Seventh Heaven (Stone played the local guttersnipe, The Sewer Rat). Originally billed as Georgie Stone, he made a successful transition to talking pictures in Warner Bros.' Tenderloin, speaking in a pleasant, slightly nasal tenor. Stone was then typecast in streetwise roles, often playing a Runyonesque mobster or a gangland boss's assistant. He was best known as Rico Bandello's right-hand man Otero in the gangster classic Little Caesar (1931). He adopted a dapper pencil moustache for these screen roles. One of his most famous appearances was in the classic musical 42nd Street (1933), in which wiseguy Stone assesses a promiscuous chorus girl: "She only said no once, and then she didn't hear the question!" His one starring film (as George E. Stone) was Universal Pictures' gangster comedy The Big Brain.
In 1939 comedy producer Hal Roach hired Stone for his film The Housekeeper's Daughter. It was a difficult role: Stone had to play a mentally retarded murderer in a sweet, sympathetic manner. Stone went clean-shaven, emphasizing a boyish, innocent look, and played the part so sensitively that Roach often cast him in other films. In 1942 Stone burlesqued Hirohito in Roach's lowbrow wartime comedy The Devil with Hitler.
George E. Stone's most familiar role was "The Runt," loyal sidekick to adventurous ex-criminal Boston Blackie in Columbia Pictures' action-comedies. Stone was supposed to co-star with Chester Morris in the first film of the series, Meet Boston Blackie, but was sidelined by a virus. Actor Charles Wagenheim filled in for him, and Stone joined the series in the second entry, Confessions of Boston Blackie. Stone's performances in the Blackies were well received, and he enthusiastically played scenes for laughs (doing dialects, disguising in women's clothes, posing as a child, or reacting in wide-eyed amazement or frustration to each story's twists and turns). Both Chester Morris and George E. Stone reprised their screen roles for one year in the Boston Blackie radio series.
Even in his smallest roles, Stone made an impression. In the 1945 newspaper-themed feature Midnight Manhun], he plays a murder victim who doesn't say a word but expires eloquently. Another tiny role has Stone contributing to the perennial holiday favorite Miracle on 34th Street -- but not in the film. He appears in the coming-attractions trailer, as an openly cynical screenwriter confronted by a bossy movie producer.
George E. Stone made guest appearances in movies and television through the 1950s, in situation comedies (Burns and Allen) and action-adventure shows (Adventures of Superman, as mob leader "Big George"). When it came to playing tough guys, Stone could be just as convincing as the biggest, brawniest men. In the feature film The Man with the Golden Arm, Stone is the vindictive mobster who has been cheated at cards, and attacks dealer Frank Sinatra in a brutal fistfight.
Stone's vision deteriorated in the late 1950s, limiting him to walk-on roles or undemanding character parts. He plays nervous stool pigeon "Toothpick Charlie" in Billy Wilder's comedy hit Some Like It Hot, and became a TV regular in the popular Perry Mason series, in the minor role of court clerk.
One of Stone's closest friends was reporter-humorist Damon Runyon. Stone often appeared in movie adaptations of Runyon's work; his last film, Pocketful of Miracles (1961), cast Stone as a blind beggar. (In the original screen version of the story, Lady for a Day, Stone played one of the major characters.)
For his contributions to motion pictures, Stone received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A minor prototype of the "Runyon-esque" character for more than three decades, Polish-born actor George E. Stone (né George Stein) was in actuality a close friend of writer Damon Runyon and would play a host of colorful "dees, dem and dos" cronies throughout the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. With great names such as Johnnie the Shiek, Boots Burnett, Ice Box Hamilton, Wires Kagel, Ropes McGonigle, Society Max, and Toothpick Charlie, Stone delighted audiences in scores of crimers for decades. A vaudeville and Broadway hoofer in the interim, the runt-sized Stone (5' 3") finally scored in his first "grownup" part as the Sewer Rat in the silent drama Seventh Heaven (1927) starring the once-popular romantic pair Charles Farrell (I) and (Academy Award winner) Janet Gaynor (I). As "Georgie" sounded too child-like, he began billing himself as "George E. Stone." From there he was featured in a number of "tough guy" potboilers, particularly for Warner Bros. So typed was he as a henchman or thug, that he found few films outside the genre. His gunsels often possessed a yellow streak and could be both broadly comic or threatening in nature, with more than a few of them ending up on a morgue slab before film's end, including his Earl Williams on Front Page, The (1931) and Otero in the classic gangster flick Little Caesar (1931). Stone's most popular role of the 1940s was as The Runt in the Boston Blackie film series which ran from 1941 to 1948 and starred Chester Morris (I). Suffering from failing eyesight in later years, he was virtually blind by the late 1950s but, thanks to friends, managed to secure sporadic film and TV work. From 1958 on, Stone could be glimpsed in a recurring role on the popular courtroom series "Perry Mason" (1957) as a court clerk. Married to second wife Marjorie Ramey in 1946, he died following a stroke in 1967 in Woodland Hills, California, and was survived by two sisters.
