Clinton Sundberg

Biography

Soft-spoken small-part actor Clinton Sundberg was a minor player on the MGM payroll during the late 1940s and '50s. A one-time teacher who turned his focus to character acting, his rather meek countenance and light, raspy tenor tones befitted a comfortable niche playing courteous servile types in mostly sentimental tales. As various desk clerks, waiters and menservants (and maybe a couple of out-of-character villains), he seemed to back up a large roster of MGM's biggest stars in musicals (he himself didn't sing) including June Allyson in Good News (1947), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) and Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), to name a few. Of these, he may be best remembered as Judy Garland's benevolent bartender in Easter Parade (1948). Other more prominent parts came as a snippy butler in The Girl Next Door (1953) and private eye J. Scott Smart's "Man Friday" in the Universal mystery programmer The Fat Man (1951). A Broadway veteran, Sundberg's better known stage roles were as Mortimer in "Arsenic and Old Lace" and Mr. Kraler in "The Diary of Anne Frank." TV allowed him to be a bit more assertive in personality while also showing his intelligent side as assorted doctor and professor types. Sundberg went on to appear in dozens of voice-overs and commercials in the 1970s. He died of heart failure in 1987 shortly after his 84th birthday.