after becoming an actor, he worked in broadway plays and in touring theatrical companies for many years prior to his 1930 movie debut. he was in the original broadway company of the 1922 play "seventh heaven" and would appear in the movie remake ("seventh heaven") in 1937. he featured with donald meek in a series of short mysteries based on s.s. van dine stories for warner bros. he was often typecast in the role of an authority figure; to wit, prison warden, judge, politician or police chief, but played various types of characters, appearing in more than three hundred movies, movie serials or television programs from the 1930s through the 1950s. as an example, he does a brief turn in robes as the judge who passes sentence on soon-to-be-racketeer james cagney for violation of the volstead act in "the roaring twenties" (1939). hamilton appeared as a police inspector in the john huston film "in this our life" in 1942. modern-day serial fans can see hamilton's iconic persona already developing as professor gordon, the outwardly no-nonsense but secretly compassionate father of young, man-of-action flash gordon in "flash gordon conquers the universe" (1940). he became much more widely known when he was cast as the irascible "daily planet" newspaper editor perry white in the 1950s tv classic "adventures of superman" (1951). after that, he appeared in television commercials for a brand of bifocals termed "inviso no-line glasses". (the idea was to render invisible the seam in the lens "that tells the world you're over forty".)