Wallace Beery
Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American film and stage actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as General Director Preysing in Grand Hotel, as the pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa! for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, and his title role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 films during a 36-year career. His contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stipulated in 1932 that he would be paid $1 more than any other contract player at the studio. This made Beery the highest-paid film actor in the world during the early 1930s. He was the brother of actor Noah Beery and uncle of actor Noah Beery Jr.
For his contributions to the film industry, Beery was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Early life
Beery was born the youngest of three boys on April 1, 1885, in Clay County, Missouri, near Smithville. The Beery family left the farm in the 1890s and moved to nearby Kansas City, Missouri, where his father was a police officer. A fourth brother, Charles, was born in 1880 but survived only a day after his birth. There might have been an older sister but information is faint.Beery attended the Chase School in Kansas City and took piano lessons as well, but showed little love for academic matters. He 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. Beery ran away from home a second time at age 16 and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later after being clawed by a leopard.
Career
Early career
Wallace Beery joined his older brother Noah in New York City in 1904, finding work in comic opera as a baritone, and appeared on Broadway and in summer stock theatre. He was in The Belle of the West in 1905. His most notable early role came in 1907 when he starred in The Yankee Tourist to good reviews.Comedy film star – Essanay Studios
In 1913, he moved to Chicago to work for Essanay Studios. His first movie was likely a comedy short, His Athletic Wife.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. Sweedie Learns to Swim co-starred Ben Turpin. Sweedie Goes to College starred Gloria Swanson, whom Beery married the following year.
Other Beery films from this period included In and Out, The Ups and Downs, Cheering a Husband, Madame Double X, Ain't It the Truth, Two Hearts That Beat as Ten, and The Fable of the Roistering Blades.
The Slim Princess, with Francis X. Bushman, was one of his earliest feature-length films. Beery also did The Broken Pledge and A Dash of Courage, both with Swanson.
Beery played a German soldier in The Little American with Mary Pickford, directed by Cecil B. De Mille. He 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.
Villainous roles
In 1917, Beery portrayed Pancho Villa in Patria at a time when Villa was still active in Mexico.Beery was a villainous German in The Unpardonable Sin with Blanche Sweet. For Paramount, he did The Love Burglar with Wallace Reid; Victory, with Jack Holt; Behind the Door, as another villainous German; and The Life Line with Holt.
Beery was the villain in five major releases in 1920: 813; The Virgin of Stamboul for director Tod Browning; The Mollycoddle with Douglas Fairbanks, in which Fairbanks and Beery fist fought as they tumbled down a steep mountain; and in the noncomedic Western The Round-Up starring Roscoe Arbuckle as an obese cowboy in a well-received serious film with the tagline "Nobody loves a fat man." Beery continued his villainy cycle that year with The Last of the Mohicans, playing Magua.
Beery had a supporting part in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Rudolph Valentino. He 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 also featured his brother Noah Beery Sr.
Historical films
Beery had a large then-rare heroic part as King Richard I in Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. The lavish movie was a huge success and spawned a sequel the following year starring Beery in the title role of Richard the Lion-Hearted.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. He played another historical ruler, King Philip IV of Spain, in The Spanish Dancer with Pola Negri.
Beery starred in an action melodrama, Stormswept for FBO Films alongside Noah Beery Sr. The tagline on the movie's posters was "Wallace and Noah Beery – The Two Greatest Character Actors on the American Screen."
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.
Beery had the title role in Bavu, about Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. He co-starred with Buster Keaton in the comedy Three Ages, the first feature Keaton wrote, produced, directed, and starred in.
Beery was a villain in The Eternal Struggle, a Mountie drama, produced by Louis B. Mayer, who eventually became crucial to Beery's career. He 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.
Beery was in The Drums of Jeopardy and had a supporting role in The Sea Hawk for director Frank Lloyd. He also appeared in a supporting role for Clarence Brown's The Signal Tower starring Virginia Valli and Rockliffe Fellowes.
Paramount
Beery signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He had a support role in Adventure directed by Victor Fleming.At First National, he was given the star role of Professor Challenger in Arthur Conan Doyle's dinosaur epic The Lost World, arguably his silent performance most frequently screened in the modern era. 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.
Beery starred in a comedy with Raymond Hatton, Behind the Front, and he was a villain in Volcano!. He was a bos'n in Old Ironsides for director James Cruze, with Charles Farrell in the romantic lead.
Beery had the title role in the baseball movie Casey at the Bat. He was reunited with Hatton in Fireman, Save My Child and Now We're in the Air. The latter also featured Louise Brooks, who was Beery's costar in Beggars of Life, directed by William Wellman, which was Paramount's first part-talkie movie.
He made a fourth comedy with Hatton, Wife Savers, then Beery starred in Chinatown Nights for Wellman, produced by a young David O. Selznick. This film was shot silent with the voices dubbed in by the actors afterward, which worked spectacularly well with Beery's resonant voice, although the technique was not used again during the silent era for another full-length feature. Beery then played in Stairs of Sand, a Western also starring Jean Arthur, before being fired by Paramount.
MGM
signed Beery to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a character actor. 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.Beery's second film for MGM was also a huge success: Billy the Kid, an early widescreen picture in which he played Pat Garrett. He supported John Gilbert in Way for a Sailor and Grace Moore in A Lady's Morals, portraying P. T. Barnum in the latter.
Stardom
Beery was well established as a leading man and top-rank character actor. The picture that really made him one of the cinema's foremost stars was Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler and directed by George W. Hill, a sensational success.Beery made a third film with Hill, The Secret Six, a gangster movie with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable in key supporting roles. The picture was popular, but was surpassed at the box office by The Champ, which Beery made with Jackie Cooper for director King Vidor. The film, especially written for Beery, was another box-office sensation. Beery shared the Best Actor Oscar with Fredric March. Though March received one vote more than Beery, Academy rules at the time—since rescinded—defined results within one vote of each other as "ties."
Beery's career went from strength to strength. Hell Divers, a naval airplane epic also starring a young Clark Gable billed under Beery, was a big hit. So, too, was the all-star Grand Hotel, in which 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. In 1932, his contract with MGM stipulated that he be paid a dollar more than any other contract player at the studio, making him the world's highest-paid actor.
Beery was a German wrestler in Flesh, a hit directed by John Ford, but Ford removed his directorial credit before the film opened, so the picture screened with no director listed despite being labeled "A John Ford Production" in the opening title card. Next Beery was in another all-star ensemble blockbuster, Dinner at Eight, with Jean Harlow holding her own as Beery's comically bickering wife. This time, Beery was billed third, under Marie Dressler and John Barrymore.
Beery was lent to the new 20th Century Pictures for the boisterously fast-paced comedy/drama The Bowery, also starring George Raft, Jackie Cooper, and Fay Wray, and featuring Pert Kelton, under the direction of Raoul Walsh. The picture was a smash hit.
Back at MGM, he played the title role of Pancho Villa in Viva Villa! and was reunited with Dressler in Tugboat Annie, a massive hit. He was Long John Silver in Treasure Island, MGM's third-largest hit of the season, and remains currently viewed as featuring one of Beery's iconic performances.
Beery returned to 20th Century Productions for The Mighty Barnum, in which he played P. T. Barnum again. Back at MGM, he was a kindly sergeant in West Point of the Air and was in an all-star spectacular, China Seas, this time billed beneath Clark Gable.
O'Shaughnessy's Boy reunited Beery and Jackie Cooper. He had the lead as the drunken uncle in MGM's adaptation of Ah, Wilderness! and went back to 20th Century – now 20th Century Fox – for A Message to Garcia with Barbara Stanwyck.
At MGM, he was in Old Hutch and The Good Old Soak, then he was back at Fox for Slave Ship, taking second billing under Warner Baxter, a rarity for Beery after Min and Bill catapulted his career into the stratosphere in 1931, during which he received top billing in all but six films.