Biography
Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in
The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and
The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as
Escape and
Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film
30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on
Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV
Gunsmoke, of course, went to
James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as
Two on a Guillotine (1964) and
Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series
Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly
Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of
Jake and the Fatman (
Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide