Si Jenks

Biography

American character actor of rustic types, Si Jenks was born Howard Hansell Jenkins in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on 23 September 1876, to John (a shopkeeper) and Catherine Jenkins. He was the sixth of seven children. Little is known of his boyhood. At 21, on 21 April 1898, the first day of the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard (Co. F, 6th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry). He served until October, 1898 (two months following the end of the war), but never left the U.S. during his tour of duty. The following January, he enlisted for three years in the U.S. Army, but only served eight months, as an artilleryman, again without leaving the U.S. He returned to Norristown in 1899 after his military service and worked at a local inn as a hostler through at least 1904. At some point, he developed an interest in entertainment as a career. By 1919, he was married to Victoria Allen, with whom he teamed up in a vaudeville act called "Small Town Wise Crackers." They toured the Orpheum Circuit, appearing in 45 theatres in 36 cities across the U.S. At some point, the marriage and the act broke up, and Jenkins, now billing himself as Si Jenks, continued with a variety of new partners in the act. In 1922, the tour landed him in Los Angeles. Comic actor-director Al St. John, whose later career as a bearded Western sidekick would come to resemble Jenks's, gave the 46-year-old vaudevillian small parts in a couple of his comedy shorts at Fox, where Jenks also was also cast in his first feature film, John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) After a lapse of a couple of years, Jenks came to the attention of Mack Sennett, who put Jenks to work in some 15 pictures over the next decade. Jenks's most familiar roles called for him to work without his dentures and with a scrubby beard, and he quickly found work in a large number of mainly comedic roles, primarily in Westerns. Despite his familiarity as bearded sidekick types, he never achieved the fame of a George 'Gabby' Hayes or Al 'Fuzzy' St. John, but he was very much of a type with those actors. Largely in smaller roles, Jenks made over 220 films, as well as a handful of TV episodes, over the course of his thirty-year career. He retired in 1954 at 78 and lived much of the rest of his life with his wife and fellow ex-vaudevillian, British actress Lilian Hartford, at the Motion Picture Country House & Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He died there of heart disease at 93, on 6 January 1970. She followed him in death at age 100, in 1983.