32 Facts About Lyle Talbot

Lyle Talbot was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and in 1933 served on that organization's first board of directors.

Later, as a teenager, Lyle Talbot moved with his grandmother to Omaha, Nebraska.

Lyle Talbot already had some experience, though very limited, in performing on screen, namely in small roles in a few shorts, which included a bit part as a gangster in The Nightingale and playing a police captain in The Clyde Mystery.

Lyle Talbot possessed those qualities, for his screen test at Warner Bros.

Lyle Talbot quickly accepted Zanuck's offer to join the company's growing ranks of contract players, who included the rising stars Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart.

Just prior to his work in Love Is a Racket, Lyle Talbot appeared as a major supporting character, Dr Jerome Preston, in Unholy Love, a drama produced by Warner Bros.

Some other notable films in which Lyle Talbot was cast in his first years at Warner Bros.

Lyle Talbot continued to perform in a variety of co-starring roles, such as romancing Mae West in Go West, Young Man, pursuing opera star Grace Moore in One Night of Love, and playing a bank robber on the run in Heat Lightning.

Lyle Talbot appeared opposite an array of other stars during his career, including Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Astor, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Glenda Farrell, Joan Blondell, Marion Davies, and Shirley Temple.

Lyle Talbot shared the screen with Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy and Tyrone Power.

Usually the villain in his screen roles, Lyle Talbot is probably the most unvillain-like person in Hollywood.

Lyle Talbot cares little for publicity ballyhoo and wants to spread his career out over a period of years, rather than have it burst into a sudden skyrocket of flame and then die out.

Lyle Talbot has grand taste in clothes, his ties, socks and shirts always blending.

Lyle Talbot is never seen where actors are usually seen.

Lyle Talbot never wants to be just a nice young hero but he would like to be a little nice on the screen for a change.

Lyle Talbot seldom received starring roles again, although he continued to find steady work as a capable character actor, often playing the "other man", affable neighbors, or crafty villains with equal finesse.

Lyle Talbot's supporting roles spanned the gamut, as he played cowboys, pirates, detectives, street cops, surgeons, psychiatrists, soldiers, judges, newspaper editors, storekeepers, and boxers.

Lyle Talbot worked with the Three Stooges in Gold Raiders and played villains in four comedies with The Bowery Boys.

Lyle Talbot was notable too for being the first live-action actor to play two prominent DC Comics characters on-screen: Commissioner Gordon in Batman and Robin, and supervillain Lex Luthor in Atom Man vs Superman.

Lyle Talbot began a longstanding tradition of actors in these roles that were most recently filled by Jeffrey Wright and Jesse Eisenberg, respectively.

Lyle Talbot had a role on The Vigilante movie serial too for the original Vigilante Greg Saunders, again for DC Comics.

In 1960, after an absence of more than 20 years, Lyle Talbot returned to the Warner Bros.

Lyle Talbot starred in Preston Jones' "The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia" at the Alley Theatre in Houston and the Chicago area Lincolnshire Theater.

Lyle Talbot rode the wave of the dinner theater phenomenon in the 1970s, acting in light comedies onstage in various Midwestern towns where former television actors were major attractions.

Lyle Talbot was a frequent presence on American television from the 1950s well into the 1970s with occasional appearances in the 1980s.

Lyle Talbot had a recurring role as Paul Fonda in numerous episodes of The Bob Cummings Show.

Lyle Talbot played Colonel Billings three times on The Adventures of Kit Carson, appeared four times as a judge on the syndicated series The Cisco Kid, guest-starred in four episodes of Gene Autry's The Range Rider in 1952 and 1953, was cast five times in different roles on The Lone Ranger between 1950 and 1955, and played Sheriff Clyde Chadwick in the 1959 episode "The Sanctuary" on Colt.

On one episode of Green Acres Lyle Talbot played himself but in the fictional role of a senator, spoofing actors such as Ronald Reagan who actually became politicians later in their careers.

Lyle Talbot narrated at that time two televised PBS biographies, The Case of Dashiell Hammett and World Without Walls about pioneering female pilot Beryl Markham.

Lyle Talbot had many romantic entanglements and several brief marriages to Elaine Melchoir, Marguerite Cramer, Abigail Adams, and Keven "Eve" McClure who next married novelist Henry Miller.

Under Paula's influence, Lyle Talbot quit drinking, and the couple often performed together on stage in summer stock and community theater.

On March 2,1996, Lyle Talbot died at the age of 94 at his home in San Francisco, California.