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Alan Reed

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By Old Time Radio Shows


Alan Reed

ALAN REED, who plays the role of Pasquale on Life With Luigi (CBS, Sundays, at 10 P.M., EDT), has done spots on virtually every radio program in New York and Hollywood, including a dozen or more daytime serials. His best known roles have been Falstaff Openshaw, poet, on the Fred Allen Show, Clancy the cop on Duffy’s Tavern and Mr. Weamish on the Baby Snooks Show. Today his voice is heard in twenty-twwo dialects on almost all of major shows.

Alan Reed was born in New York and started his preparations for the theater during grammar school days when, as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”  he caught his beard in the stage door. Quick thinking made him play it that way ever since.

After extracting as much humor as he could from prep school. Reed moved his 210 pounds to Columbia University, where he became the intercollegiate broad-jumping champion wrestler and writer of college plays, just to prove that a brawny arm could swing a delicate pen

Reed considered this good training for the theater and, when he finished school, he took a job in an Oklahoma City stock company. That lasted three weeks. Next he was with the Provincetown Players in a cycle of sea plays by Eugene O’Neill, the same plays which later were made into the movie, “Long Voyage Home.” After that he tried a whirl behind the scenes as manager and production chief of the New Playwright’s Theater, a little theater job which included everything from shifting scenery to shifting lines.

This was good experience, but little theater work didn’t pay very well, so Reed took to the vaudeville boards. Trouping, he saved a stake of $2,800 and tried the candy business and the gymnasium business in a succession.
About the time that radio began to emerge from the crystal set stage, Reed began haunting the broadcasting studios and found his services in great demand. He has acted in radio exclusively ever since—with the exception of a role as an immigrant in the Broadway play, “Hope for a Harvest,” which starred Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, just before the war—and listeners are glad of it.
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