19 Facts About Frank Tinney

Frank Aloysius Robert Tinney was an American blackface comedian and actor.

Frank Tinney suffered a number of health problems after the scandal, and eventually had a nervous breakdown.

Frank Tinney never regained his health and died in November 1940.

Frank Tinney was born in Philadelphia the third of four children raised by Hugh Francis and Mary Frank Tinney, both first generation Irish-Americans.

Frank Tinney did perform with his brother Joseph at church and social functions and briefly one summer made an appearance on a vaudeville stage in a child act.

Frank Tinney's parents had hoped he would pursue a career in medicine, but instead as a young man, Tinney found work as a chief lifeguard at Atlantic City, fire engine driver and undertaker's assistant.

Frank Tinney made his New York debut in 1910 appearing in vaudeville shows headed by Gertrude Hoffman and later Eva Tanguay, which led the following year to a spot in the Shubert brothers' Revue of Revues at the Winter Garden Theatre.

Frank Tinney appeared in a number of Broadway hits over the dozen years of his career.

Frank Tinney played Noah in A Winsome Widow, a 1912 Ziegfeld adaptation of Charles Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown.

Frank Tinney performed in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1913 and the musical revues, Watch Your Step, The Century Girl and Doing Our Bit.

Frank Tinney played himself as the central character in Tickle Me, a popular musical comedy that had a long run on Broadway and in subsequent tours between August 1919 and April 1922.

Frank Tinney opened the play with a skit playing his well-known blackface character, then assumed the role of a Hollywood studio property manager.

Frank Tinney was the daughter of Millie Davenport, a one-time vaudeville star and later Broadway wardrobe supervisor, and a sister of Stella Jones, then known on the vaudeville stage as the Spanish dancer La Estrellita.

Frank Tinney later appeared in the 1933 Cecil B DeMille film This Day and Age, along with the namesake sons of actors Eric von Stroheim, Wallace Reid, Bryant Washburn, Carlyle Blackwell, Neal Hart and Fred Kohler.

Davenport filed for divorce on August 6,1924, the same day Frank Tinney sailed for England and some hours after an early morning incident in which he destroyed the camera of a press photographer attempting to take a picture of Frank Tinney and Wilson as they were leaving a New York night spot.

Frank Tinney eventually followed Tinney to London, where the two resumed their abusive affair until Wilson was lured away with an offer to perform in German motion pictures.

When Frank Tinney returned to New York in 1925, he found that many of his friends had deserted him and that his popularity with the theater-going public had waned.

Frank Tinney died on November 28,1940, of a pulmonary condition after a long stay at Veterans Hospital in Northport, Long Island.

Frank Tinney had served as a captain with the Army Quartermaster Corps during World War I and was accorded a military funeral at Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, Pennsylvania.