Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (1885-1949) shares with Edward G Robinson the honour of being the 1930s’ most unlikely-looking star/leading man. Beery was, during his heyday, successfully marketed by MGM as a lovable slob, but seems to have been disliked by virtually everyone he worked with, for his constant upstaging and unpleasant behaviour. Jackie Cooper, who worked with him four times when a child actor, claimed they, after Beery died, they “couldn’t find eight guys to carry his casket”.
Wallace Beery was that rare entertainer who actually did run away from home to join the circus. A few years later he began stage work, singing in comic operas, and then on Broadway and in summer stock.
He made his first film, for Essanay, in 1913, the first of more than 200 appearances. He also directed a number of shorts for Essanay and for Nestor Pictures between 1913 and 1919.
Beery specialized in playing villains during the 1920s, though one of his more prominent roles was as King Richard in Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922). And in 1925 he was cast as Professor Challenger in First National’s The Lost World.
MGM signed Beery as a character actor, but he unexpectedly became a leading man after being teamed with Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1930). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Champ (1931), tying with Fredric March (who had actually received a higher number of votes).
Beery appeared three times in MGM musicals. In A Lady’s Morals, he had a supporting role as P T Barnum. In Going Hollywood, he features in archival footage at a premiere. And in A Date with Judy, his penultimate picture, he was top billed as Elizabeth Taylor’s dad.
