made his film debut in Hollywood's version of the play Her Unborn Child, a motion picture directed by Albert Ray and produced by Windsor Picture Plays Inc. At Twentieth Century-Fox, Cook made an impression as a bespectacled college freshman with radical ideas in the musical comedy Pigskin Parade (1936). He was also featured in the unofficial sequel, Life Begins in College (1937). Cook remained at Fox for two years, and then began freelancing at other studios. He did return to Fox occasionally in prominent roles: as a songwriter in the Alice Faye-Betty Grable musical Tin Pan Alley (1940), and as a mobster disguised as an old woman in the Laurel and Hardy feature A-Haunting We Will Go (1942). Typical of his early, bookish roles was his turn as a meek screenwriter in the madcap Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin (1941). After The Maltese Falcon, Cook became typecast again, as weaklings or sadistic losers and hoodlums, who in the plots were usually murdered, either being strangled, poisoned or shot. In Universal's Phantom Lady (1944), he portrays a slimy, intoxicated nightclub-orchestra drummer to memorable effect. He received excellent notices for his portrayal of a happy, breezy disc jockey who turns out to be a homicidal maniac in The Falcon's Alibi (1946). He also had a substantial, though uncredited role as Bobo in the 1953 film noir production I, the Jury. In addition to his performance as Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon (1941), some of Cook's other notable roles include the doomed informant Harry Jones in The Big Sleep (1946), the henchman (Marty Waterman) of the murderous title character in Born to Kill (1947), the pugnacious ex-Confederate soldier 'Stonewall' Torrey who is gunned down by Jack Palance in Shane (1953), and George Peatty, the shady, cuckolded husband in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). Other films in which he appeared are William Castle's horror film House on Haunted Hill (1959), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Papa's Delicate Condition (1963), Blood on the Arrow (1964), Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Great Bank Robbery (1969), El Condor (1970), Blacula (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), The Outfit (1973), Tom Horn (1980), and Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse (1984). Television Cook appeared on a wide variety of American television series from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. He played a private detective, Homer Garrity, in an episode of Adventures