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Soft-spoken small-part actor Clinton Sundberg was a minor player on the MGM payroll during the late 40s 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.
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