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Jay Novello

Jay Novello
Jay Novello
Born: 1905
Died: Sep 02, 1982 in North Hollywood, California
Occupation: Actor
Active: '40s-'60s
Major Genres: Comedy, Drama
Career Highlights: This Rebel Breed, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima
First Major Screen Credit: Two Gun Sheriff (1941)
Filmography
HARUM SCARUM 1965
8 Videos for Jay Novello
The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967) Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) Rhapsody in Blue (1945)
Harum Scarum (1965) The Robe (1953) Boys Town (1938)
Pocketful of Miracles (1961) The Big Sky (1952)
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Biography:

American actor Jay Novello began his film career with Tenth Avenue Kid (1938). Small, wiry and mustachioed, Novello found a home in Hollywood playing shifty street characters and petty thieves; during the war he displayed a friendlier image as a Latin-American type, appearing as waiters and hotel clerks in innumerable Good Neighbor films set south of the border.

Once the war was over, it was back to those scraggly little characters, even in such period pieces as The Robe (1953), in which Novello played the unsavory slave dealer who sold Victor Mature to Richard Burton. Adept in TV comedy roles as meek milquetoasts and henpecked husbands, Novello was a particular favorite of Lucille Ball, who used the actor prominently in both I Love Lucy (first as the man duped by the Ethel to Tillie seance, then as a gondolier in a later episode) and The Lucy Show (as a softhearted safecracker).

Jay Novello remained active in films into the '60s, as scurrilous as ever in such fantasy films as The Lost World (1960) and Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961); he also stayed busy in such TV programs as The Mothers in Law, My Three Sons and McHale's Navy, playing a recurring role in the latter series as a resourceful Italian mayor.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide.