Arthur Joseph O'Connell (March 29, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an American stage, film and television actor, who achieved prominence in character roles in the 1950s.

He recovered in a sanitarium for the indigent, and for a time was on home relief living in a cheap room, subsisting on "milk, raw eggs and bananas.

[4] His career breakthrough came on Broadway, where he originated the role of Howard Bevans, the middle-aged swain of a spinsterish schoolteacher in Picnic.

He recreated the Bevans role in the 1955 film version, opposite Rosalind Russell as the schoolteacher, earning an Oscar nomination.

[5] After Picnic, he appeared in another Joshua Logan film, Bus Stop, in 1956, as the down-to-earth friend of the lead, played by Don Murray.

In that same year he appeared in Solid Gold Cadillac, playing a kindly office manager in love with Judy Holliday.

[6] In 1962, he portrayed the father of Elvis Presley's character in the motion picture Follow That Dream, and in 1964 in the Presley-picture Kissin' Cousins.

In 1966, he guest-starred as a scientist who regretfully realized that he has created an all-powerful android in an episode of the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, titled "The Mechanical Man."

On May 18, 1981, O'Connell died of Alzheimer's disease at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles.