23 Facts About Keenan Wynn

Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn was an American character actor.

Keenan Wynn took his stage name from his maternal grandfather, Frank Keenan, one of the first Broadway actors to star in Hollywood.

Keenan Wynn's father was Jewish and his mother was of Irish Catholic background.

Ed Wynn encouraged his son to become an actor, and to join The Lambs Club, which he did in 1937.

Keenan Wynn appeared in several plays on Broadway, including Remember the Day, Black Widow, Hitch Your Wagon, The Star Wagon, One for the Money, Two for the Show, and The More the Merrier.

Keenan Wynn played the title role, "a carefree young man who runs into trouble galore and becomes an involuntary detective".

Keenan Wynn appeared in hundreds of films and television series between 1934 and 1986.

Keenan Wynn was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player during the 1940s and 1950s.

Keenan Wynn had a brief role as a belligerent, unsympathetic drunk in the wartime romance The Clock.

The son was returning the favor: according to radio historian Elizabeth McLeod, Keenan had helped his father overcome professional collapse, a harrowing divorce, and a nervous breakdown to return to work a decade earlier, and now helped convince Serling and producer Martin Manulis that the elder Wynn should play the wistful trainer.

Keenan Wynn featured in another Rod Serling production, a Twilight Zone episode entitled, "A World of His Own" as playwright Gregory West, who uniquely caused series creator Rod Serling to disappear.

On January 18,1959, Wynn starred in S J Perelman's Hollywood satire, "Malice in Wonderland", broadcast on NBC's prestigious Sunday afternoon anthology series Omnibus.

Keenan Wynn took a dramatic turn as Yost in the crime drama Point Blank with Lee Marvin.

Keenan Wynn had a leading role in the third Beach Party movie, Bikini Beach as a scheming newspaper publisher who wants to banish the local young people.

Keenan Wynn appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's musical Finian's Rainbow, Sergio Leone's epic western Once Upon a Time in the West, and Robert Altman's Nashville.

David Wayne, a friend of Keenan Wynn's, had played Digger Barnes in 1978 but was unable to continue with the role because of his co-starring role on the CBS series, House Calls, starring Wayne Rogers.

Keenan Wynn was initially cast in Superman to play Perry White in April 1977.

Keenan Wynn played Charles Picker Dobbs on a 1982 episode of The Love Boat.

Keenan Wynn was married to former stage actress Eve Lynn Abbott until their divorce in 1947, whereupon Abbott married actor Van Johnson, one of the couple's closest friends.

Keenan Wynn's other son, Tracy Keenan Wynn, is a screenwriter whose credits include The Longest Yard and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

Keenan Wynn was an uncle by marriage to the Hudson Brothers.

Keenan Wynn was a long-standing active member of the Westwood Sertoma service club, in West Los Angeles.

Keenan Wynn's ashes are interred in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park in The Great Mausoleum, Daffodil Corridor, Columbarium of the Dawn, in a niche alongside his father Ed Wynn, his daughter Emily, who died from lupus, and his aunt.