20 Facts About Snub Pollard

Harold Fraser, known professionally as Snub Pollard, was an Australian-born vaudevillian who became a silent film comedian in Hollywood, popular in the 1920s.

Snub Pollard ran several highly successful professional children's troupes that traveled Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In 1908, Harry Snub Pollard joined the company tour to North America.

In later years, Snub Pollard said Hal Roach had discovered him while he was performing on stage in Los Angeles.

The most famous Snub Pollard comedy is 1923's It's a Gift, in which he plays an inventor of many Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, including a car that runs by magnet power.

In early 1923, shortly after his second marriage, Snub Pollard returned with his wife Elizabeth to see his relations in Australia.

Snub Pollard's visit attracted considerable attention, and he appeared again in several theaters to speak about the motion picture business.

Snub Pollard's contract lapsed in 1925 and Roach did not renew it.

Snub Pollard returned to motion pictures when he was signed by the low-budget Weiss Brothers-Artclass studio in May 1926.

The new talking pictures were a challenge for many silent stars, but Snub Pollard made the transition.

The plans fell through and Snub Pollard returned to California, in hopes of landing work in feature films as a character comic.

Snub Pollard's first talking feature was Ex-Flame for the independent Liberty Pictures.

Snub Pollard played small speaking parts in comedies and comic relief in "B" westerns.

Snub Pollard remarried in 1935, to the former Ruth Bridges; the couple divorced in 1939.

Snub Pollard appeared with other film veterans in Hollywood Cavalcade, The Perils of Pauline, and Man of a Thousand Faces.

Snub Pollard appeared regularly as a supporting player in Columbia Pictures' two-reel comedies of the mid-1940s, and was a latter-day member of the Keystone Cops in movies and personal appearances.

Snub Pollard played incidental roles in dozens of Hollywood features and shorts, almost always as a mousy, nondescript fellow, usually with no dialogue.

In Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles, Snub Pollard plays a Broadway beggar.

Snub Pollard died of cancer on 19 January 1962, aged 72, after nearly 50 years in the movie business.

Snub Pollard's interment was at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.