Blustery, bulbous Billy Gilbert was born into a show business family and weaned on laughter and applause. After enjoying success as a solo comedian, he became a producer of clean burlesque shows in the teens and '20s, earning a million dollars by the time he was 25 and losing it all in the stock market crash. While starring in the Los Angeles musical revue Temptations of 1929, he was spotted by comedian Stan Laurel, who offered Gilbert a job as a gag writer. Though interested, Gilbert decided to first try his luck as a film actor; it wouldn't be until 1931 that Gilbert would join Laurel at Hal Roach's studios. Over the next three years, he co-starred with Laurel and Hardy (unforgettably as Professor Theodore Von Schwarzenhoffen, M.D., A.D., D.D.S., F.L.D., F.F.F., and F. in the team's Oscar-winning The Music Box); and in Our Gang with Thelma Todd, Patsy Kelly, Franklin Pangborn, Clyde Cook, and Charley Chase. After the termination of his Roach contract, Gilbert freelanced in features and short subjects at every major studio and not a few minor ones, sometimes in unbilled bits (he had two lines as an Italian musician in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera) and sometimes in juicy starring and co-starring assignments. His more memorable roles include the bombastic big game hunter ("I bring 'em back dead -- I come back alive!") in Laurel and Hardy's Blockheads (1938), befuddled courier Joe Bledsoe in Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1939), the dancing Sheik of Araby in Tin Pan Alley (1940), and Field Marshal Herring in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). He also provided the voice of Sneezy in the Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which gave him full head to perform his specialty, an agonizingly delayed sneezing routine. In the mid-'40s, he starred in a trio of low-budget Monogram slapstick comedies with his good pal and occasional business partner Shemp Howard. On Broadway, Gilbert authored the 1952 musical play Buttrio Square and directed two plays, one of which starred his old Hal Roach cohort ZaSu Pitts. He continued appearing in films until suffering a stroke in 1961, and guest starred on dozens of TV series, including Andy's Gang, Shirley Temple Storybook, and The Danny Thomas Show. Gilbert's last work included a "sneezing" commercial for Four Way Cold Tablets and a guest spot on the 1971 Johnny Carson special Sun City Scandals. From 1937 until his death, Billy Gilbert was married to actress Ella McKenzie.