William Clement Frawley (February 26, 1887 – March 3, 1966) was an American vaudevillian and actor best known for playing landlord Fred Mertz in the sitcom I Love Lucy.

As he got older, he played small roles in local theater productions at the Burlington Opera House, and performed in amateur shows, though his mother, a highly religious woman, discouraged such activities.

[1] Two years later, he moved to Chicago, where he found work as a court reporter, and against his mother's wishes, got a singing part in a musical comedy, The Flirting Princess.

After his initial success as a scriptwriter, Frawley decided to move to the West, settling in Denver, where he was hired as a singer at a café and teamed with pianist Franz Rath.

During his vaudeville career, Frawley introduced and helped popularize the songs "My Mammy",[3] "My Melancholy Baby", and "Carolina in the Morning".

Frawley had his first dramatic role in 1932, playing press agent Owen O'Malley in the original production of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Twentieth Century.

He subsequently performed in three more, but did not decide to develop a cinematic career until 1933, when he appeared in some short comedy films and the feature musical Moonlight and Pretzels (Universal Studios, 1933).

[6] Some of Frawley's other memorable film roles were as the baseball manager in Joe E. Brown's Alibi Ike (1935), the wedding host in Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and a hard-nosed insurance investigator in My Home in San Antone with Roy Acuff and Lloyd Corrigan.

When he heard that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were casting a new television situation comedy, he applied eagerly to play the role of the cantankerous, miserly landlord Fred Mertz.

Arnaz (himself a heavy drinker) warned Frawley about the network's concerns, telling him that if he was late to work, arrived drunk, or was unable to perform because of something other than legitimate illness more than once, he would be written out of the show.

The series was broadcast for six years as half-hour episodes, later changing to hour-long specials from 1957 to 1960 titled The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show (later retitled The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour).

In 1957, at the end of I Love Lucy, Ball and Arnaz gave Frawley and Vance the opportunity to have their own Fred and Ethel spin-off series for Desilu Studios.

[11] Frawley next joined the cast of the ABC (later CBS) situation comedy My Three Sons, playing live-in grandfather and housekeeper Michael Francis "Bub" O'Casey beginning in 1960.

Frawley reportedly never felt comfortable with the out-of-sequence filming method used for My Three Sons after doing I Love Lucy in sequence for years.

[13] He had performed that song previously on television, as Fred Mertz, in the 1958 episode "Lucy Goes to Sun Valley" on the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.

)[15][16] Frawley suffered a fatal heart attack while walking on Hollywood Boulevard and died on March 3, 1966, five days after his 79th birthday.

[17] Upon learning of his death, Desi Arnaz immediately took out a full-page ad in all the trade papers, with the words: "Buenas noches, amigo.

[17][20] He is memorialized, as well, in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, New York, which also contains his "Hippity-Hoppity" (frog) costume from an episode of I Love Lucy.