Arnold Stang was only 5ft 3in tall; he had a whiny, nasal voice and possessed all the menace of a bespectacled tortoise. He played a string of nerds and weaklings and was Frank Sinatra’s sidekick Sparrow in the drama The Man with the Golden Arm (1955).
His greatest role resulted from a piece of inspired casting, putting Stang at the head of a New York street gang, albeit a gang of alley cats. He provided the voice of the main character in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show Top Cat (1961-62). It was renamed Boss Cat in Britain because there was a cat food called Top Cat. The memorable theme song and all the dialogue still confusingly referred to the character as Top Cat — TC to most of his friends.
Stang also co-starred in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie, Hercules in New York (1970) when they were billed as Arnold Stang and Arnold Strong.
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Stang’s date and place of birth are widely cited as Chelsea, Massachusetts, and 1925, but according to his family he was born in 1918 in New York. His father was a lawyer and latterly a salesman.
He claimed he was only 9 when he started working on radio, travelling from Massachusetts to New York by himself for an audition. But his widow told The New York Times that the story was untrue and that he was in his teens. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stang lent his distinctive voice to dozens of radio comedies, crime shows and soap operas, frequently playing more than one role. He served in turn as sidekick to Henry Morgan, Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle.
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By the early 1940s he was working in films, as an actor on screen and providing voices for cartoon characters. He provided the voice of the mouse Herman in more than 30 Paramount/Famous Studios animated shorts in the 1940s and 1950s and voiced Popeye’s friend Shorty for Famous Studios. From the late 1940s he was appearing regularly on television.
Otto Preminger provided Stang with one of his strongest dramatic roles in The Man with the Golden Arm, in which Sinatra played Frankie Machine, a drug-addicted drummer newly released from prison, and Stang was a small-time crook and conman.
There was only one season of Top Cat, but the show, in which Stang played a character modelled on Phil Silvers’s Sgt Bilko, has proved a classic. Stang played a Chinese character called Ah Chong in Wagon Train (1961), made a guest appearance on Bonanza (1961), he was Rumpelstiltskin in MGM’s The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), had a cameo in the big-budget comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and worked with Preminger again on the comedy Skidoo (1968).
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In Hercules in New York Hercules is blasted out of Olympus after disagreements with his father and befriends Stang’s character, who is physically inferior but more streetwise. Schwarz- enegger’s Austrian accent was so strong that his lines had to be dubbed.
Stang continued to do voice work and play supporting roles in movies until the mid-1990s, with later appearances in Ghost Dad (1990) and Dennis (1993). He was married for 60 years and is survived by his wife and two children.
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Arnold Stang, actor, was born on September 28, 1918. He died on December 20, 2009, aged 91