Al White

Al White is an American character actor who worked for eight years as a janitor at Golden Gate Park before choosing to act. He spent three years in the American Conservatory Theater company and appeared in more than seventeen plays, among them works by Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. He created the part of a military officer in Williams's This Is (An Entertainment), and his stage work earned him several awards. In 1975 the troupe made a bicentennial cultural exchange trip to the Soviet Union, performing at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater and in Leningrad and Riga. On screen he is best known for Airplane!, where he played the jive-talking man whose words need translating, and he returned to that character in a courtroom scene in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). His film credits also include Back to the Future Part II, and on television he had parts in Wonder Woman, The Jeffersons, and The King of Queens.