He was born Gerschon Lichtenstein in Łódź, Congress Poland into a Jewish family. He sailed from the Port of Hamburg, Germany, as a steerage passenger on board the S/S President Grant, which arrived at the Port of New York on May 29, 1913; at Ellis Island, he passed federal immigrant inspection with his two sisters and a brother.

As an actor, Stone’s slight build and very expressive face first attracted attention in the 1927 silent-film 7th Heaven, where he played the local street thug The Sewer Rat. Originally billed as Georgie Stone, he made a successful transition to talking pictures in Warner Bros.’ Tenderloin, speaking in a pleasant, slightly nasal tenor. Stone was then typecast in streetwise roles, often playing a Runyonesque mobster or a gangland boss’s assistant. He was best known as Rico Bandello’s right-hand man Otero in the gangster classic Little Caesar (1931). He adopted a dapper pencil moustache for these screen roles. One of his most famous appearances was in the classic musical 42nd Street (1933), in which wiseguy Stone assesses a promiscuous chorus girl: “She only said ‘no’ once, and then she didn’t hear the question!” His one starring film (as George E. Stone) was the Universal Pictures gangster comedy The Big Brain (1933).

Throughout his career, Stone was sidelined by illness. In 1936, he fell ill with pneumonia and lost out on a film role. He was also sidelined by a virus and was unable to film the first of Columbia’s fourteen Boston Blackie pictures (1941–49) with Chester Morris. He fell ill again in 1948, and in the early 1950s began losing his sight to the point of almost total darkness in both eyes. He told The Daily Mirror on November 1958, “To me, it meant the end of everything I’d taken for granted.” In 1958, he underwent surgery to save his sight. In fact, his sight was so limited by the time that he played the county clerk on Perry Mason that he had to be led around the set by his co-stars.

In 1939, comedy producer Hal Roach hired Stone for his film The Housekeeper’s Daughter. It was a difficult role: Stone had to play a mentally retarded murderer in a sweet, sympathetic manner. Stone went clean-shaven, emphasizing a boyish, innocent look, and played the part so sensitively that Roach often cast him in other films. In 1942, Stone burlesqued Hirohito in Roach’s wartime comedy The Devil with Hitler.

In the 1942 film Little Tokyo, U.S.A., he played the Japanese agent, Kingoro.

Even in his smallest roles, Stone made an impression. In the 1945 newspaper-themed feature Midnight Manhunt, he plays a murder victim who doesn’t say a word but expires eloquently. Another tiny role has Stone contributing to the perennial holiday favorite Miracle on 34th Street – but not in the film. He appears in the coming-attractions trailer, as an openly cynical screenwriter confronted by a bossy movie producer. Stone made guest appearances in movies and television through the 1950s, in situation comedies (The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show) and action-adventure shows (Adventures of Superman, as mob leader “Big George”). When it came to playing tough guys, Stone could be just as convincing as the biggest, brawniest men. In the feature film The Man with the Golden Arm, Stone is the vindictive mobster who has been cheated at cards, and attacks dealer Frank Sinatra’s friend Arnold Stang in a brutal fistfight.

After suffering a major stroke in 1966 which left him bedridden and unable to speak, Stone spent the majority of his last year of life at the Motion Picture Country Home until he died May 26, 1967.