The names of his parents are confirmed in both Janney's death certificate (available in Ancestry.com) and in a birth announcement in The Ogden Standard,[1] April 4, 1917.

His mother had reportedly performed using the name Bernice Raymon (The Washington Post,[2] Oct. 31, 1915), or Ramon (Philadelphia Inquirer [3] April 1, 1934).

The story in the Inquirer states that Janney's mother gave him the stage name Laon Ramon after moving to Los Angeles to seek more acting work for him.

He spent some years in vaudeville, and made his first appearance on radio in 1926, making the leap to legitimate theater soon after.

He appeared in a string of movies portraying the boyhood incarnations of actors such as Ricardo Cortez, Reginald Denny, and Conrad Nagel.

Producer Hal Roach took notice of Janney and hired him to appear in the Our Gang comedy Bear Shooters as "Spud".

However, Roach realized that he was too old to gel with the other members of the gang, and Bear Shooters marked his only appearance as a Little Rascal.

Janney was a master of using convincing foreign accents, and even more so at adapting regional dialects of the United States.

In his final years, he was a regular on television shows, Another World, and playing two roles on The Edge of Night.

[citation needed] In the same year he played Ed Gorton on the detective TV series Hawk.

[7] On Broadway, Janney appeared in Three Men on a Horse (1969), Kelly (1965), The Last Analysis (1964), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), Venus at Large (1962), A Call on Kuprin (1961), The Gazebo (1958), A Shadow of My Enemy (1957), Measure for Measure (1957), Threepenny Opera (1955), The Flowering Peach (1954), Madam, Will You Walk (1953), Ghost for Sale (1941), Foreigners (1939), The Bough Breaks (1937), Mulatto (1935), Parade (1935), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles1935) and Every Thursday (1934).