Ernest Truex

Biography

Ernest Truex looked like the man who apologized when you stepped on his foot: five-foot-three, voice perpetually caught in his throat, lapels razor-sharp even when the world around him crumbled. Born in Kansas City on 19 September 1889 to a doctor who bartered medical bills for acting lessons, he learned Shakespeare before he learned long division and was promoted at age five as “The Youngest Hamlet”—though, in truth, he played only the ghost. When his parents split, nine-year-old Ernest and his mother folded themselves into a touring act called “The Child Entertainers,” rattling through mining camps with Othello monologues and Romeo’s balcony scene tucked between ragtime numbers. By 1908 he was on Broadway opposite Lillian Russell in Wildfire; two years later he traded quips in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and, in 1915, married chorus girl Julia Mills while both were hoofing through Very Good Eddie. Mary Pickford tapped him for the 1913 stage hit A Good Little Devil and again for the 1913 film Caprice and its 1914 screen reprise—launching a silent-era résumé full of polite schemers: Artie, the Millionaire Kid (1916), Come on In (1918), Good-Bye, Bill (1918), and a string of two-reel misadventures that ended with Six Cylinder Love (1923). Between silents and sound he never left footlights far behind. After Julia’s death he wed actress Mary Jane Barrett; the pair sparked New York laughter in The Third Little Show (1931), The Hook-Up (1935), and Fredericka (1937). He then directed, co-produced, and headlined Sing and Whistle (1934) opposite Sylvia Field—who became wife number three once the divorce papers dried. Sons Philip, James, and Barry (from the first two marriages) all tried the family trade; Barry’s brightest moment arrived blowing clarinet as young Benny Goodman in 1956. Talkies turned Truex into everyone’s favorite exasperated doormat: insurance man kidnapped by crooks in Whistling in the Dark (1933), henpecked spouse in Mama Runs Wild (1937), jittery executive bullied by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), and the fretting merchant in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) who can’t believe he’s tangling with Gary Cooper. Between film shoots he kept Broadway buzzing with George Washington Slept Here, Androcles and the Lion, and the anthology Best Sellers. Television finally gave his nervous energy a living-room home: science-teacher granddad on Mister Peepers, harried boss on The Ann Sothern Show, and the twinkling “Pop” in Pete and Gladys. After seven decades of stammering, scheming, and soft-shoeing, the little fellow with the big résumé bowed out on 27 June 1973 in Fallbrook, California, heart calling curtain at age 83.