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Wallace Beery is a Actor and Director American born on 31 march 1885 at Kansas City (USA)

Wallace Beery

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Birth name Wallace Fitzgerald Beery
Nationality USA
Birth 31 march 1885 at Kansas City (USA)
Death 15 april 1949 (at 64 years) at Beverly Hills (USA)
Awards Academy Award for Best Actor

Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (April 1, 1885 – April 15, 1949) was an American film actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa!, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 movies during a 36-year career. His contract with MGM stipulated in 1932 that he be paid $1 more than any other contract player at the studio, making him the highest paid actor in the world. He was the brother of actor Noah Beery, Sr. and uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr.

Biography

Beery's first wife was actress Gloria Swanson; the two performed onscreen together. Although Beery had enjoyed popularity with his Sweedie shorts, his career had taken a dip, and during the marriage to Swanson, he relied on her as a breadwinner. According to Swanson's autobiography, Beery raped her on their wedding night, and later tricked her into swallowing an abortifacient when she was pregnant, which caused her to lose their child. Beery's second wife was Rita Gilman. They adopted Carol Ann, daughter of Rita Beery's cousin. Both marriages ended in divorce.

In December 1939, the unmarried Beery adopted a seven-month-old infant girl Phyllis Ann. Phyllis appeared in MGM publicity photos when adopted, but was never mentioned again. Beery told the press he had taken the girl in from a single mother, recently divorced, but filed no official adoption papers.

Beery was considered misanthropic and difficult to work with by many of his colleagues. Mickey Rooney related in his autobiography that Howard Strickling, MGM's head of publicity, once went to Louis B. Mayer to complain that Beery was stealing props off of the studio's sets. "And that wasn't all," Rooney continued. "He went on for some minutes about the trouble that Beery was always causing him ... Mayer sighed and said, 'Yes, Howard, Beery's a son of a bitch. But he's our son of a bitch.' Strickling got the point. A family has to be tolerant of its black sheep, particularly if they brought a lot of money into the family fold, which Beery certainly did."

Child actors, in particular, recalled unpleasant encounters with Beery. Jackie Cooper, who made several films with him early in his career, called him "a big disappointment", and accused him of upstaging, and other attempts to undermine his performances, out of what Cooper presumed was jealousy. He recalled impulsively throwing his arms around Beery after one especially heartfelt scene, only to be gruffly pushed away.
Child actress Margaret O'Brien claimed that she had to be protected by crew members from Beery's insistence on constantly pinching her.

Rooney remained an exception to the general negative attitude among child actors. In his memoir he described Beery as "... a lovable, shambling kind of guy who never seemed to know that his shirttail belonged inside his pants, but always knew when a little kid actor needed a smile and a wink or a word of encouragement." He did concede that "not everyone loved [Beery] as much as I did." Beery, by contrast, described Rooney as a "brat", but a "fine actor".

Beery owned and flew his own planes, one a Howard DGA-11. On April 15, 1933 he was commissioned a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy Reserve at NRAB Long Beach. One of his proudest achievements was catching the largest black sea bass in the world off Santa Catalina Island in 1916, a record that stood for 35 years.

A noteworthy episode in Beery's life is chronicled in the 5th episode of Ken Burns' documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea: In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating Jackson Hole National Monument to protect the land adjoining the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Local ranchers, outraged at the loss of grazing lands, compared FDR's action to Hitler's taking of Austria. Led by an aging Beery, they protested by herding 500 cattle across the monument lands without a permit.