Sig Ruman, who plays the cynical insurance company physician ("Fake!") plays the same role as Dr. Emil Eggelhoffer in "Nothing Sacred", disputing Charles Winniger's dipsomaniac country doctor's claims of Carole Lombard's (Hazel Flagg's) radium poisoning.
shareRuman, a gifted comic actor, first made his mark in the Broadway production of Vicki Baum's GRAND HOTEL as the crooked industrialist Preysling (his victim in the stage version was Albert Dekker as Baron Geiger). Ruman got a Hollywood contract eventually, but he never played his part (nor did Dekker play his) in the MGM film version of GRAND HOTEL (Ruman's part was played by Wallace Beery, while Dekker's by John Barrymore). Still Ruman got good roles in film, usually as a comic heavy type, such as the impressario Herman Gottleib in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. In the follow up Marx Brother film, A DAY AT THE RACES,
Ruman would play Dr. Leopold X. Steinhauer (I think that's the name). Soon after he was playing Dr. Egglehoffer in NOTHING SACRED. He was good playing know-it-all doctors in comedies. My favorite is in another Billy Wilder comedy
THE EMPEROR WALTZ, where he is a veterinarian in the royal kennels at Schonbruun Palace. He has met Freud and is trying to use psychoanalysis on the royal pooches (in this case the Emperor Franz Joseph's - Richard Haydn's -
prize dog "Scheherazade".
Jeff