Benjamin Greenberg (1893-1974) had had a long and varied show business career before ever setting foot on a Hollywood set, and long after giving up acting.
He started out as a singer while still in his teens, working in musicals and vaudeville. In 1921 he began working as straight man to the comedian Jack Pearl, and they worked as a double act both in vaudeville and on Broadway. It was in 1926 that he made his first screen appearance, under the name Bardson Bard, in Sandy, a Fox melodrama.
Bard went on to act in over thirty features and a handful of shorts, including a prominent role in Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927), and supporting roles in three of Val Lewton’s horror pictures, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim (memorable and sinister as the leader of the satanists) and The Ghost Ship (all 1943). He was also reunited with his former partner in Pearl’s Meet the Baron (1933).
In 1934, Bard founded a drama school in Los Angeles, with a number of Hollywood luminaries receiving their initial training there, including Alan Ladd and Angie Dickinson. In the late fifties, he worked with new talent at Twentieth Century-Fox, and was a dialogue director at MGM in the sixties.
Bard was in one MGM musical, Hollywood Party, which co-starred his one-time partner, Jack Pearl.
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