Byron Kay Foulger<!--Foulger's full name is cited repeatedly in official records, a few examples being his U.S. draft-registration documents and in his 1926 marriage license and certificate. See birth name entry in info box!--> (August 27, 1898 – April 4, 1970) was an American character actor who over a 50-year career performed in hundreds of stage, film, and television productions.
Early years
Born in Ogden, Utah, Byron was the second of four children of Annie Elizabeth (née Ingebertsen) of Norway and Arthur Kay Foulger, a native of Utah who worked as a carpenter for the region's railroad company. Byron completed his primary and secondary education in local public schools before enrolling at the University of Utah, where he started acting through his participation in community theatre.
Career
Foulger made his Broadway debut in March 1920 in a production of Medea featuring Moroni Olsen, and performed in four more productions with Olsen on the "Great White Way", back-to-back, ending in April 1922. He then toured with Olsen's stock company.
Foulger worked as a director for the Portland Civic Theater in Portland, Oregon in the early 1930s, before working at the Pasadena Playhouse as an actor, assistant director, and director.
In 1932 he began performing in films, initially in bit parts. His first three screen appearances are in Night World (1932), The Little Minister (1934), and The President's Mystery (1936), the latter based on a story by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He also starred in an exploitation film, It's All in Your Mind (1937, released 1938), in which Foulger, a timid bookkeeper, samples the fast life of nightclubs and parties. Byron Foulger's motion picture career, however, did not begin in earnest until 1937, after he performed in December of that year on NBC Radio opposite Mae West in a racy "Adam and Eve" sketch on the network's popular variety program The Chase and Sanborn Hour. That sketch and another performance by West with Charlie McCarthy during a later segment of the same program resulted in her being banned from NBC programming until 1950. Foulger, who provided the voice of the serpent in the controversial biblical parody,<!--Citation needed to document this. According to the 1996 biography Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon by Ramona Curry, the voice of the serpent in the "Adam and Eve" radio skit was provided by Edgar Bergen, not Byron Foulger. Refer to "In the skit..." on page 79 of Curry's book available online at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/toomuchofgoodthi0000curr/page/78/mode/2up !--> was not banned for his brief supporting role; instead, his association with the sketch brought him widespread media attention and greater audience recognition. From that point on, he worked steadily in motion pictures.
Foulger played many partsstorekeepers, hotel desk clerks, morticians, professors, bank tellers, ministers, confidence men, and a host of other characterizationsusually timid, whining, weak-willed, shifty, sanctimonious, or sycophantic. His earliest films show him clean-shaven, but in the 1940s, he adopted a wispy mustache that emphasized his characters' worried demeanor. When the mustache went gray in the 1950s, he reverted to a clean-shaven look. Foulger was a resourceful actor, and often embellished his scripted lines with memorable bits of business; in The Falcon Strikes Back, for example, hotel clerk Foulger announces a homicide by bellowing across the lobby: "Mur-der! Mur-der!
In real life, Foulger was not as much of a pushover as the characters he played. In one memorable incident at a party, he threatened to punch Errol Flynn for flirting with his wife, actress Dorothy Adams, to whom he was married from 1921 until his death in 1970.