Byron Foulger (born 27 August 1899 in Ogden, Utah; died 4 April 1970 in Hollywood, California) was an American film character actor with a familiar face who appeared in hundreds of movies and dozens of television programs.
Foulger attended the University of Utah, and came to acting through participation in community theatre. He made his Broadway debut in March 1920 in a production of Medea featuring Moroni Olsen, and went on to do 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, and ended up at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he both acted and directed.
Foulger made his first films in 1934 and 1936 – The Little Minister and The President's Mystery, the latter based on a story by Franklin Delano Roosevelt – but his career didn't start in earnest until 1937, after he performed opposite Mae West in a racy "Adam and Eve" sketch on the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy network radio program that got her banned from the airwaves almost immediately. (Foulger played the voice of the serpent). From this point on, Foulger worked steadily in motion pictures.
Foulger played many parts: storekeepers, hotel desk clerks, morticians, professors, bank tellers, ministers, confidence men, and a host of other characterizations, usually whining, weak-willed, shifty, sanctimonious or sycophantic. His earliest films show him clean-shaven, but in the 1940s he adopted a wispy moustache that emphasized his characters' worried manner. 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 private 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, the actress Dorothy Adams, with whom he was married from 1921 until his death in 1970.
In the 1940s, Foulger was part of Preston Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors, appearing in five films written by Sturges, The Great McGinty, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (recreating the role of McGinty's secretary he played in The Great McGinty) and The Great Moment. Although in "A" pictures, such as Sturges', Foulger would frequently not receive a screen credit, in B movies such as 1939's The Man They Could Not Hang, he would get more substantial parts and be billed.
By the late 1950s he was so established as a mild-mannered worrywart that it was only necessary for Foulger to show his face on screen to get a welcoming laugh from the audience. (This happens in the cameo-laden Frank Capra comedy Pocketful of Miracles.) In a humorous coup, the actor was cast against type for the most prominent role of his career: playing the Devil opposite The Bowery Boys in Up in Smoke, and was billed in ads and posters as one of the film's three stars.
Beginning in 1950, Foulger made over 90 appearances on television, in programs such as Death Valley Days, I Love Lucy, The Cisco Kid, My Little Margie, The Man Behind the Badge, The Lone Ranger, Climax Mystery Theatre, Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Maverick, The Red Skelton Show, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Bonanza, Burke's Law, Perry Mason, Laredo and Gunsmoke. He played multiple-episode characters on Dennis the Menace ("Mr. Timberlake"), Lassie ("Dan Porter") and The Andy Griffith Show ("Fred, the hotel clerk"). On Petticoat Junction he played two recurring roles: "Mr. Guerney" and engineer "Wendell Gibbs".
Notable later television credits included the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance" – in which Gig Young tells Foulger, who is playing a drugstore counterman, that he thinks he's seen him before, to which Foulger replies: "I've got that kind of face" – the short-lived 1967 series Captain Nice, and The Mod Squad, his last appearance in episodic television.
Byron Foulger's last film appearances were in The Love War, a made-for-TV movie, and There Was a Crooked Man..., both in 1970. He died of heart problems on 4 April of that year at the age of 70, and is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. His two daughters with Adams, Amanda Ames and Rachel Ames, are both actresses.
