Biography
El Brendel (born Elmer Goodfellow Brendel) was an American actor and vaudeville comedian. He began in vaudeville in 1913 performing a German dialect act before adopting a Swedish immigrant persona, known as 'the Synthetic Swede', owing to anti-German sentiment after the sinking of the Lusitania. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and was married to his vaudeville partner Flo Bert.
Brendel entered films in 1926 and appeared in eight productions for Famous Players over the next two years. He played Herman Schwimpf in the First World War aviation drama Wings (1927), which won the first Academy Award for Outstanding Production. After returning to the stage, he signed with Fox Film Corporation in 1929, where sound films boosted his popularity through malaprop-ridden dialogue in comedies such as The Big Trail (1930) and the musical Just Imagine (1930), in which he starred as Single-O. He later worked in Columbia shorts and made occasional television appearances, including on Perry Mason.
