[1] Born in New York City, Schilling had a rubber face and flustered gestures which made him a natural comedian and he began his career understudying comedy stars Bert Lahr and Joe Penner on Broadway.

There Welles hired Schilling to appear in a stage production featuring several Shakespearean scenes.

"I learned my part by taking the script to Welles and having him translate the lines to everyday English," Schilling recalled in 1939.

[3] This established Schilling in Hollywood movies as a "nervous" comedian (he plays a jittery symphony conductor in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin', for example).

His final film, Welles's Touch of Evil, in which he has a brief uncredited appearance, was released in May 1958, nearly a year after his death.