John Conte was born in Palmer, Massachusetts. His mother was Italian, and his father was French-Italian. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, when John was 5. While a student at Lincoln High School in Los Angeles, Conte focused on classes in drama and for three years was the school’s top entrant in Shakespearian competition. After graduating, he joined the Pasadena Playhouse and “took every role offered to him — juvenile, leading man, character.” He later got jobs as a radio actor and singer. Conte entered broadcasting with a job at KFAC in Los Angeles. Two years later, he had become a network announcer. He was MC for the Maxwell House program that featured Fanny Brice and Frank Morgan, and he was announcer for Silver Theater on CBS radio. One of his first regular roles was on the Burns and Allen radio show in the 1940s. In 1947, he appeared in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s short-lived Broadway musical Allegro. He returned to Broadway in 1950 to appear in the musical Arms and the Girl.

His television career began as Master of Ceremonies on the 1951 late Sunday afternoon comedy hour, Star Time, co-starring Frances Langford and Lew Parker as John and Blanche Bickerson (“The Bickersons”), as well as sound-effects master stand-up comedian Reginald Gardner. His own weekly solo skit on Star Time was as an hilarious, heavily accented Italian-American chef ( in an all-white uniform, complete with huge muffin-shaped chef’s hat) preparing bumbled recipes as he recited them along with frequent tangential references to “the homemade-a wine” fermenting in his bathtub visible from the kitchen. This led to a featured guest appearance with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows about a year later. He then hosted Matinee Theater, a live-drama series on NBC (one of the first daytime shows on network television). John Conte made five guest appearances on Perry Mason : In three different episodes, he played the role of the murder victim. In another episode he was the defendant, and in still another as the murderer. His major film role was “Drunky” in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955).

In 1968 John Conte and his long-term third wife, Sirpuhe Philibosian Conte, launched KMIR-TV, an NBC-affiliated UHF station in the Palm Springs–Rancho Mirage market. The Contes built KMIR into the third-largest station in the Coachella Valley, and after thirty years (in 1999) sold the station to Milwaukee-based Journal Communications. He was a founding sponsor of the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, and one of the founders of the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert, California. On February 8, 1960, Conte was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6119 Hollywood Blvd. In 1997, a Golden Palm Star on the Walk of Stars was dedicated to him. He died of natural causes at Eisenhower Medical Center at age 90. Conte was interred at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City, California.