Given the fact that the mustachioed, beady-eyed Harold Huber looked as though he'd stepped right out of a Damon Runyon story, it's hard to believe that Huber could ever have hoped for a successful career as a lawyer. Yet it is true that Huber, a graduate of the Columbia University law school, did indeed briefly hang out an attorney's shingle. By the time he was in his mid-20s, however, Huber had switched to acting, often in shifty, underhanded roles of various nationalities. He showed up in a handful of Charlie Chan films, usually equipped with an unconvincing comic-opera foreign accent; he was, however, thoroughly convincing as the fast-talking New York police detective in 1937's Charlie Chan on Broadway. A busy radio and television performer, Harold Huber starred on the radio versions of Fu Manchu and Hercule Poirot, and was top-billed as Broadway columnist Johnny Warren on the 1950 TV series I Cover Times Square.
by Hal Erickson
biography
