His real surname was Italian and considered too hard to pronounce, so he took a stage name, Cravat, from a character in a play he had seen and liked.

[3] Cravat and Burt Lancaster met as youngsters at a summer camp in New York and became lifelong friends.

[4] They created an acrobatic act called Lang and Cravat in the early 1930s, and joined the Kay Brothers circus in Florida.

He played a mute character in several films such as The Flame and the Arrow, The Crimson Pirate, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955), and the TV series The Count of Monte Cristo, mostly because his thick Brooklyn accent would have been out of place.

He had two daughters from his second marriage, to Cecilia Brink: Marcelina "Marcy" Cravat-Overway and Christina "Tina" Cravat (a.k.a.