AllMovie

Character actor Jack Diamond -- not to be confused with the juvenile actor (and later male ingenue) of the same name who began working in the early '50s -- was a veteran of the New York stage who didn't make his first screen appearance until well into his career in 1949. His specialty, given his voice and physical appearance, was rough-hewn, garrulous characters. In addition to work in legitimate theater, mostly in comedy, he also seems to have had some experience in burlesque and was an effective straight man, at least based on one odd piece of filmed evidence. Shortly after World War II, Diamond worked with comic legend Joey Faye in a short film based on the classic routine "Floogle Street" (to which Faye claimed authorship, although it ended up effectively being "owned" for posterity by Abbott & Costello by virtue of their perfection of it on film). He and Faye worked together on-stage as well as in television, in tandem with fellow funny-man Danny Dayton, on The Arrow Show (1949), done out of New York City. Diamond's most enduring contribution to popular culture came in 1948 with the original Broadway production of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, in which he portrayed one of the two gangsters who arrive backstage to collect a "debt of honor," he was one of the two singers on "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," on-stage and on the original cast recording. He made his movie debut in an uncredited role, as a bum, in Anthony Mann's New York-shot film noir Side Street (1950). Most of his subsequent credits were in anthology television, such as Lux Video Theater's "Thanks for a Lovely Evening," authored by satirist Leonard Wibberley and co-starring Art Carney, Marcel Hillaire, and Veronica Lake. Many sources intermingle Diamond's television and film credits with those of his younger namesake (who was also billed occasionally as "Jackie Diamond" and "Jack Dimond").