Phil Tead
actor
- Birth name:
- Phillips Tead
- Born:
- 1893-09-29, Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
- Died:
- 1974-06-09, Los Angeles, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor
Biography
Phil Tead entered the world on 29 September 1893 in Somerville, Massachusetts, and spent the next eight decades turning that voice—raspy, rapid-fire, unmistakably Bostonian—into a passport through the early days of American entertainment. Barely out of his teens he faced Edison’s cameras in The Lost Paradise (1914), one of silent film’s first dips into tropical melodrama. When talkies arrived he kept pace: witness the suitcase-switching mayhem of Six of a Kind (1934) where his news-hawk hustle steals scenes from W.C. Fields himself. Television later found room for that crackling delivery; week after week he popped up on Adventures of Superman (1952) as a breathless broadcaster or snooping scribe, helping Metropolis stay one headline ahead of catastrophe. The final curtain fell on 9 June 1974 in Los Angeles, but the reels—and kryptonite-charged airwaves—still carry the echo of Phil Tead’s unmistakable bark.
