Harvey B. Dunn

Harvey B. Dunn led a long and successful performing career as a radio announcer and stage, television, and movie character actor; although he appeared in small roles in a variety of mainstream films, he achieved a peculiar form of screen stardom and immortality in the larger parts that he portrayed in several notoriously bad (but fascinating) films directed by Edward D. Wood Jr. and Tom Graeff. A southerner by birth, Dunn's earliest professional engagements were as an announcer on WALB radio in Albany, GA, and WFLB in Fayetteville, NC. Later based in Chicago, his theatrical work included roles in The Front Page, The Late Christopher Bean (with Zazu Pitts), The Barker (with James Dunn), and Present Laughter (with Edward Everett Horton). He played in stock across the country and appeared as a dramatic actor on Colgate Theater on early television. In between was a lot of other work -- his own professional bio claimed experience in every area of theater "except medicine shows and grand opera." His earliest credited screen role was in MGM's 1951 Vengeance Valley, which was sort of that studio's answer to Universal's Winchester '73 released the prior year and he also had a small part in Billy Wilder's Sabrina in 1954. Starring roles beckoned Dunn, not from the likes of Wilder or anyone at MGM, but from director/producer Edward D. Wood Jr., who cast the avuncular actor as the police captain in Bride of the Monster (1956) -- Dunn gave what was probably the straightest performance in the film, with some odd little character touches that seemed natural and pleasing in their bizarre way (typical of a Wood script), such as his character's fascination with feeding his pet bird in the office. He also had a role in Wood's final film as a director, The Sinister Urge which was not widely distributed and in-between played the role of the genial grandfather in Tom Graeff's bizarre, low-budget sci-fi thriller Teenagers From Outer Space. He continued working in movies and on television into the early '60s in small parts, but never got the kind of screen time that Wood and Graeff had afforded this likable character actor, whose round face and genial manner recalled both Lloyd Corrigan and Hal Smith.