Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American film and stage actor.
66 Facts About Wallace Beery
2.
Wallace Beery was the brother of actor Noah Beery and uncle of actor Noah Beery Jr.
3.
Wallace Beery was born the youngest of three boys in 1885 in Clay County, Missouri, near Smithville.
4.
The Wallace Beery family left the farm in the 1890s and moved to nearby Kansas City, Missouri, where the father was a police officer.
5.
Wallace Beery attended the Chase School in Kansas City and took piano lessons, as well, but showed little love for academic matters.
6.
Wallace Beery ran away from home twice, the first time returning after a short time, quitting school and working in the Kansas City train yards as an engine wiper.
7.
Wallace Beery ran away from home a second time at age 16, and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant elephant trainer.
8.
Wallace Beery left two years later, after being clawed by a leopard.
9.
Wallace Beery joined his older brother Noah in New York City in 1904, finding work in comic opera as a baritone, and began to appear on Broadway and in summer stock theatre.
10.
Wallace Beery appeared in The Belle of the West in 1905.
11.
Wallace Beery was then cast as Sweedie, a Swedish maid character he played in drag in a series of short comedy films from 1914 to 1916.
12.
Sweedie Goes to College starred Gloria Swanson, whom Wallace Beery married the following year.
13.
Wallace Beery did The Broken Pledge and A Dash of Courage, both with Swanson.
14.
Wallace Beery did some comedies for Mack Sennett, Maggie's First False Step and Teddy at the Throttle, but he gradually left that genre and specialized in portrayals of villains prior to becoming a major leading man during the sound era.
15.
In 1917, Wallace Beery portrayed Pancho Villa in Patria at a time when Villa was still active in Mexico.
16.
Wallace Beery was a villainous German in The Unpardonable Sin with Blanche Sweet.
17.
Wallace Beery had a supporting part in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Rudolph Valentino.
18.
Wallace Beery was a villainous Tong leader in A Tale of Two Worlds, and was the bad guy again in Sleeping Acres, Wild Honey, and I Am the Law, which featured his brother Noah Beery Sr.
19.
Wallace Beery had a large then-rare heroic part as King Richard I in Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood.
20.
Wallace Beery had an important unbilled cameo as "the Ape-Man" in A Blind Bargain starring Lon Chaney, and a supporting role in The Flame of Life.
21.
Wallace Beery played another historical king, King Philip IV of Spain in The Spanish Dancer with Pola Negri.
22.
Wallace Beery starred in an action melodrama, Stormswept for FBO Films alongside his elder brother, Noah Wallace Beery Sr.
23.
Wallace Beery played his third royal, the Duc de Tours, in Ashes of Vengeance with Norma Talmadge, then did Drifting with Priscilla Dean for director Browning.
24.
Wallace Beery had the titular role in Bavu, about Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution.
25.
Wallace Beery co-starred with Buster Keaton in the comedy Three Ages, the first feature Keaton wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.
26.
Wallace Beery was reunited with Dean and Browning in White Tiger, then played the title role in the aforementioned Richard the Lion-Hearted, a sequel to Robin Hood based on Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman; a print of Richard the Lion-Hearted is held at the Archives du Film du CNC in Bois d'Arcy.
27.
Wallace Beery was in The Drums of Jeopardy and had a supporting role in The Sea Hawk for director Frank Lloyd.
28.
Wallace Beery appeared in a supporting role for Clarence Brown's The Signal Tower starring Virginia Valli and Rockliffe Fellowes.
29.
Wallace Beery had a support role in Adventure directed by Victor Fleming.
30.
Wallace Beery was top billed in Paramount's The Devil's Cargo for Victor Fleming, and supported in The Night Club, The Pony Express for James Cruze, and The Wanderer for Raoul Walsh.
31.
Wallace Beery was a bos'n in Old Ironsides for director James Cruze, with Charles Farrell in the romantic lead.
32.
Wallace Beery had the title role in the baseball movie Casey at the Bat.
33.
Wallace Beery was reunited with Hatton in Fireman, Save My Child and Now We're in the Air.
34.
Wallace Beery made a fourth comedy with Hatton, Wife Savers, then Beery starred in Chinatown Nights for Wellman, produced by a young David O Selznick.
35.
Wallace Beery then played in Stairs of Sand, a Western starring Jean Arthur before being fired by Paramount.
36.
The association began well when Beery played the savage convict Butch, a role originally intended for Lon Chaney, in the highly successful 1930 prison film The Big House, directed by George W Hill; Beery was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
37.
Wallace Beery's second film for MGM was a huge success: Billy the Kid, an early widescreen picture in which he played Pat Garrett.
38.
Wallace Beery was well established as a leading man and top-rank character actor.
39.
Wallace Beery made a third film with Hill, The Secret Six, a gangster movie with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in key supporting roles.
40.
The picture was popular, but was surpassed at the box office by The Champ, which Wallace Beery made with Jackie Cooper for director King Vidor.
41.
The film, especially written for Wallace Beery, was another box-office sensation.
42.
Hell Divers, a naval airplane epic starring a young Clark Gable billed under Wallace Beery, was a big hit.
43.
So, too, was the all-star Grand Hotel, in which Wallace Beery was billed fourth, under Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford, one of the very few times he would not be top billed for the rest of his career.
45.
Wallace Beery was Long John Silver in Treasure Island, described as a box-office "disappointment" despite being MGM's third-largest hit of the season, and remains currently viewed as featuring one of Beery's iconic performances.
46.
Wallace Beery did a war film, a Technicolor comedy titled Salute to the Marines, then was back with Main in Rationing.
47.
Barbary Coast Gent, an extremely broad Western comedy in which Wallace Beery played a bombastic con man, teamed him with Binnie Barnes.
48.
Wallace Beery did another war film, This Man's Navy, then made another Western with Main, Bad Bascomb, a huge hit, helped by Margaret O'Brien's casting.
49.
Wallace Beery received top billing for the smash hit A Date with Judy, a hugely popular musical featuring Elizabeth Taylor.
50.
Wallace Beery died of a heart attack three days after the picture's release.
51.
On March 27,1916, at the age of 30, Wallace Beery married 17-year-old actress Gloria Swanson in Los Angeles.
52.
Around December 1939, Wallace Beery, recently divorced, adopted a seven-month-old girl, Phyllis Ann Wallace Beery.
53.
Wallace Beery told the press he had taken the girl in from a single mother, recently divorced, but he had filed no official adoption papers.
54.
Wallace Beery was considered misanthropic and difficult to work with by many of his colleagues.
55.
When prompting for another actor's close-up, Wallace Beery would read the wrong lines, making it harder for his co-stars to meet their marks.
56.
Cooper accused Wallace Beery of upstaging and other attempts to undermine his performances out of what Cooper presumed was jealousy.
57.
Wallace Beery recalled impulsively throwing his arms around Beery after one especially heartfelt scene, only to be gruffly pushed away.
58.
Wallace Beery owned and flew his own planes, one a Howard DGA-11.
59.
At or around that time, she asked Wallace Beery to marry her to "legitimatize the expected child", which Wallace Beery refused.
60.
Wallace Beery conceded that he had known Gloria for about 15 years, and that under the pseudonym "Gloria Whitney", she had played bit roles in six films in which he starred.
61.
Wallace Beery again separated from Hans Schumm on April 15,1948.
62.
Wallace Beery supported Thomas Dewey in the 1944 United States presidential election.
63.
Wallace Beery had been reading a newspaper at his Beverly Hills home when he collapsed.
64.
Wallace Beery's body was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
65.
The upshot was that Schumm's paternity suit against Wallace Beery's estate put would-be half-siblings and other would-be family legatees, including a would-be uncle, Noah Wallace Beery Sr.
66.
Wallace Beery is mentioned in the film Barton Fink, in which the lead character has been hired to write a wrestling screenplay to star Wallace Beery.