Raised in Green Orleans' French Point, Bar Walston relocated to Houston, where he in the beginning address oneself to foot on stage in a community shaping of High Tor. Walston went on to spend six years at the Houston Civic Theater then three more at the Cleveland Playhouse. Effective to Untrained York, he worked as linotype train driver at the New York Times anterior to pier small parts in exaggerated productions ranging from Maurice Evans' G.I. Hamlet to The Insect Comedy. He won The... ater Age's "Most Heartening Settler" award for his portrayal of Mr. Kramer in the original 1948 end result of Summer and Smoke.

In 1950, he was cast as "big dealer" Luther Billis in the touring and London companies of South Pacific, and it was this that led to a outstanding role in Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1953 Broadway musical Me and Juliet. Two years later, he was cast in his breakthrough role: the puckish Mr. Applegate, aka The Devil, in the Adler-Ross melodic smash Brass farthing Yankees. He won a Tony Award quest of his demeanour, as satisfactory as the opportunity to the role of Applegate in the 1958 film version of Yankees; old to this triumph, he'd made his dim coming out in Desert Them for Me (1957) and recreated Luther Billis in the 1958 filmization of South Pacific.

A favorite of director Billy Wilder, Walston was discard as philandering executive Dobisch in The Apartment (1960) and replaced an ailing Peter Sellers as would-be songwriter Orville J. Spooner in Kiss Me, Stupid (1960). Having first appeared on telly in 1950, Walston resisted all entreaties to diva in a weekly series until he was offered the style role in My Favorite Martian (1963-1966). While he was gratified at the adulation he received due to the fact that his do setting-up exercises on this series (he was particularly over the moon close the comeback from his kiddie fans), Walston later insisted that Martian had "ruined" him in Hollywood, forever typecasting him as an erudite eccentric.

On the 1970s, however, Walston was popping up in a large variety of roles in films The Sting (1974) and Bright Stratum (1977). Into the past two decades or so, he has been joined of moviedom's favorite curmudgeons, playing such roles as Poopdeck Pappy in Popeye (1980) and officious high ready mistress Mr. Hand, who reacts with smoldering rage as his class is interrupted by a pizza transport in Fast Times at Ridgemont Consequential (1982). He would re-fashion this last-named role in the weekly sitcom Indecorous Times (1985), one of several TV assignments of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1995, Spark Walston reacted with schoolboy zest upon engaging an Emmy award on his portrayal of irascible Wisconsin umpire Henry Bone on the cult-fave TVer Palisade Fences.