Edward Andrews on AllMovie

The son of a clergyman, round-faced character actor Edward Andrews took to the stage at age twelve. He made his Broadway debut in 1935's How Beautiful With Shoes; three years later he co-starred in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life. Sporting spectacles from the early 1950s onward, Andrews was ideally cast as pompous, overly ambitious military officers, politicians and attorneys. His screen persona was malleable enough to allow for villainy (he played a viciously racist small-town politico in his first film, 1955's The Phenix City Story), though he preferred comedy, taking pride in a particular "finger-waggling" gesture of his that always resulted in loud audience laughter. In 1964, he co-starred with Kathy Nolan in the distaff McHale's Navy rip-off TV sitcom Broadside. Edward Andrews joined several fellow acting veterans in Gremlins (1985), his last film.