Theodore Gottlieb
Gottlieb performed as Brother Theodore, and what he invented has no real successor: long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered with total conviction, which he called stand-up tragedy. The form behind it was the German Kabarett of the 1920s and 1930s, and one description of him has been quoted ever since, that he was Boris Karloff, Salvador Dali, Nijinsky and Red Skelton simultaneously.
Film used the voice and the face, usually in small doses. He is an uncredited man on the street in The Third Man and an uncredited bit in The Stranger three years before that.
Animation gave him the part that fits best. He voiced Gollum in the 1977 animated Hobbit and again in The Return of the King in 1980, and the sound he makes is genuinely unpleasant, wet and wheedling and nothing like the version most people now carry in their heads. He was Ruhk in The Last Unicorn in 1982, and late on Uncle Reuben Klopek in The 'Burbs in 1989, where the joke is simply that a man who really does sound like that has moved in next door.
Movies (6)
Where to start with Theodore Gottlieb
The voice work is the reason to look him up, so start with The Hobbit. His Gollum is the single best use anyone ever made of him, and it sounds nothing like the interpretation that came later. He returned to it in The Return of the King three years afterwards.
The Last Unicorn gives him Ruhk, another creature part in a children's film with a mean streak running through it. For live-action Theodore, The 'Burbs is essential: Uncle Reuben Klopek asks almost nothing of him except to exist in frame and be alarming, which he does perfectly.
The two 1940s credits, The Third Man and The Stranger, are uncredited walk-ons. Worth knowing about, not worth hunting for.