Wally Vernon
Wally Vernon (1905 – March 7, 1970) was an American comic and character actor and dancer.
Biography
Vernon was born in New York City in 1905. He was in show business from the age of three, and made his first Hollywood appearance in 1937's Mountain Music.
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 among 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 Wally Vernon and brought him back as his sidekick.
Columbia Pictures producer Jules White was constantly trying to form new comedy teams, in the slapstick tradition of The Three Stooges. In 1948 White paired Wally Vernon with Eddie Quillan, another breezy comedian with a vaudeville background. White emphasized extreme physical comedy in these 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 producer-director White, who kept making them through 1956.
Vernon was struck by and killed by a hit-and-run driver on March 7, 1970, in Hollywood, California.
Films
- This Way Please (1937)
- Broadway Serenade (1939)
- Tail Spin (1939)
- Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939)
- Chasing Danger (1939)
- The Gorilla (1939)
- Sailor's Lady (1940)
- Black Hills Express (1943)
- Tahiti Honey (1943)
- Call of the South Seas (1944)
- Holiday Rhythm (1950)
- Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952)
- What Price Glory? (1952)
- What a Way to Go! (1964)