The family of Donald George Novis (1906-66) emigrated from the UK to the USA when he was a very small child. Aged 22, Novis won a national singing competition, after which he pursued a career in singing and acting.
After securing a small role in Bulldog Drummond (1929), Novis appeared in around 30 pictures, frequently as a singer. One such appearance was in Love in the Rough. He later sang ‘Love is a Song’ in Bambi. (1941).
Novis also worked on Broadway, but was probably most active as a singer with big bands, both in live performances and on radio. From 1932-34 he led his own orchestra.
George Frear Runyon (1873-1964) made his stage debut aged 16 and achieved success in vaudeville doing comedy double acts with both his first and second wives. The act can be seen in a Vitaphone short called An Everyday Occurrence (1929).
Mack made his first film in 1925 and racked up well over 400 appearances. He started out in featured supporting roles, but the quality of his parts declined in the talking era.
Nonetheless, Mack made uncredited appearances in no fewer than twenty-two MGM musicals between 1930 and 1956: Love in the Rough, Going Hollywood, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, A Day at the Races, Broadway Melody of 1938, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, Rio Rita, Thousands Cheer, Broadway Rhythm, Two Girls and a Sailor, Thrill of a Romance, Ziegfeld Follies, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Nancy Goes to Rio, The Great Caruso, The Band Wagon, Kiss Me Kate, Easy to Love, Athena, The Glass Slipper and The Opposite Sex.
Clarence Hummel Wilson (1876-1941) had been acting on the stage for a quarter of a century when he made his film debut in 1920. He spent the next twenty years playing a variety of bailiffs, landlords and old grumps, often in featured roles, at other times without credit, totalling around 200 appearances.
Notable films featuring Wilson include: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), as the money lender; The Front Page (1931), as the sheriff; and You Can’t Take It with You (1938), as the property developer.
Wilson appeared in four MGM musicals: Love in the Rough and, uncredited, Flying High, Hollywood Party and Maytime.
Roscoe Blevel Ates (1895-1962) was working in vaudeville as a comedian when he made his screen debut in 1929’s South Sea Rose.
The following year, after an uncredited appearance in Marianne and a small part in Love in the Rough, Ates had a strong supporting role in King Vidor’s Billy the Kid (1930). He appeared in many further westerns, including a run as a character named Soapy Jones for PRC.
Ates had a speech impediment as a child, which he revived to good effect in a number of pictures playing stuttering characters.
Roscoe Ates’s other Metro musicals were Ziegfeld Girl and Meet Me in Las Vegas.
Cader Edwards Davis (1867?-1936) was an ordained minister who enjoyed the showmanship of pulpit oratory so much that he gave up the church and became an actor. (Although arrests for drunkenness and associating with loose characters may have been contributing factors.)
Davis wrote and performed in both vaudeville sketches and full-length plays. He wrote a tragedy which one newspaper described as “simply gross”, but which he performed around one thousand times.
Davis worked on Broadway and was respected enough by his colleagues to be elected president of the National Vaudeville Artists Association in 1919.
Edwards Davis made about 70 film appearances from 1915 to 1936, always in character parts. In 1926, he was third-billed to Harry Langdon and Joan Crawford in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.
Davis’s parts in the 1930s were mostly uncredited, including in Love in the Rough and as Henry VIII in Madam Satan.
The International Pageant of Pulchritude was held annually in Galveston, Texas from 1920 to 1931, and took upon itself the responsibility for choosing ‘the Beauty Queen of the Universe’. Or Miss Universe, for short.
The winner in 1926 was Catherine May Moylan (1904-69), and this led to her being invited to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927, and then to a role in the original stage production of Whoopee! in 1928.
Moylan made half a dozen brief film appearances before returning to obscurity. One of these was a credited role in Love in the Rough.
Readers of a certain (advanced) age will recall the voice, though not the stage name, of Harry Leonard Albershardt (1909-73) as that of the talking horse in Mr Ed (1961-66).
Before that, he had spent many years on top of horse in dozens of ‘B’ westerns, including 39 pictures in which he played Sheriff (or Marshal, or Lieutenant) Rocky Lane. He also gave flesh to the comic strip character Red Ryder in seven films.
Lane had made his debut in a leading man role for Fox in 1929, but his career quickly foundered, which led to him doing small parts in Love in the Rough and Madam Satan. Fortunately, a career in oaters lay ahead.
Some confusion surrounds Harry Burns, who played the gardener in Love in the Rough.
IMDb asserts confidently that he was born in 1887, died in 1948, and in between was married to actor Dorothy Vernon. It says he was an actor who made 15 films between 1915 and 1920, took a ten-year break, then made another 39 appearances between Love in the Rough and 1948, two of which were in Music for Millions and It Happened in Brooklyn. IMDb also claims Burns was the father of Bobby Vernon, even though Bobby was only ten years younger, but we will not go there.
According to the AFI Catalog, Harry Burns acted in a couple of pictures in 1923-24, but was mainly a director at that time, notably of a series of films starring Joe Martin the Chimp (no space here, but Joe is worth looking up).
As a further complication, the New York Times reported, in 1939 (not 1948), the death of “Harry Burns, former film director for William Fox and other early film producers and one-time publisher of Filmograph”. It notes that, at the time of his death, he had been working as an extra and was a champion for better treatment for extra players, and that his widow was Dorothy Vernon.
Which leads to a second IMDb entry, for director Harry Burns (1882-1939), also married to Dorothy Vernon.
It seems pretty clear that there were two men called Harry Burns making films in the same period and, probably the 1887-1948 version who made appearances in two MGM musicals. The silent pictures attributed to him by IMDb must belong to the 1882-1939 Harry Burns (especially given that one of them starred the aforesaid Joe Martin the Chimp.
He was also the one married to Dorothy Vernon. He may well have been the father of Bobby Vernon, but, if so, was a father at the age of 15.
British actor Harry Davis (1902-70) performed in the West End and on Broadway before making his first film for Pathe Exchange, shortly after the company’s restructuring by Joseph Kennedy.
Davis’s screen career only lasted ten years, but he squeezed in 38 films, one of which was Love in the Rough.
It has been suggested that Davis’s portrayal of a dance instructor in George Cukor’s Our Betters (1933) established the Hollywood template for the flamboyant gay man.
