Before becoming an actor, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Berkeley.

Screen and stage actor.

He was a stalwart, dependable character actor whose career included supporting roles and bit parts (often uncredited) in over 150 (known) feature films. A large portion of his career involved westerns, in some of which he was cast as an Indian. He is best remembered today as one of the most familiar supporting players in low-budget science-fiction films of the 1950s (starting with Lippert's Rocketship X-M (1950)), where he was usually the military officer, police chief or doctor/scientist.