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Wally Vernon

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From Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952), L-R: Scott Brady, Mitzi Green, Wally Vernon & Marguerite Chapman

Wally Vernon (May 27, 1905 – March 7, 1970) was an American comic and character actor and dancer.

Biography

Vernon was born in New York City[citation needed] in 1905. He was in show business from the age of three, appearing in vaudeville and stock theater; he made his first Hollywood appearance in 1937's Mountain Music.[1]

He made more than 75 films altogether, almost always playing a Brooklynese wiseguy and/or the hero's assistant. He was a fixture in Twentieth Century Fox features of the late 1930s and early 1940s; Vernon's considerable skill as an eccentric dancer is most fully seen in Fox's Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), where he appears as himself.

Vernon freelanced at other studios after leaving Fox. He became the unlikely sidekick to cowboy star Don "Red" Barry at Republic Pictures, and when Barry began producing his own features in 1949, he remembered Vernon and brought him back as his sidekick.

In 1948 Columbia Pictures producer Jules White paired Wally Vernon with Eddie Quillan, another breezy comedian with a vaudeville background. White emphasized extreme physical comedy in films, and Vernon and Quillan gamely indulged in pratfalling, head-banging, kick-in-the-pants slapstick. The Vernon & Quillan comedies, blunt as they are, were favorites of White, who kept making them through 1956.

On March 7, 1970, Vernon died in an ambulance shortly after being struck by a hit-and-run driver in Hollywood, California.[1]

Films

References

  1. ^ a b "Wally Vernon, movie comic, in Hollywood". The Boston Globe. Massachusetts, Boston. Associated Press. March 8, 1970. p. 95. Retrieved 9 March 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
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