Walter Connolly

Biography

Seven fat years on film were enough to tattoo Walter Connolly’s purple-faced sputter onto the public memory, even if his name later slipped into the cracks. Between 1932 and 1939 the Cincinnati-born, Dublin-educated former Shakespearean utility man stormed through more than fifty pictures, huffing indignation at Claudette Colbert, trading ulcers with Clark Gable, and generally keeping the champagne fizz of screwball alive. Capra kept him on speed-dial: Lady for a Day, Broadway Bill, It Happened One Night all leaned on that jowly thunderclap. Five years later he was still slamming phones as Fredric March’s apoplectic editor in Nothing Sacred. He had arrived late to cameras—forty-five, silver-haired, third-billed as a mild senatorial soul in Washington Merry-Go-Round—but once microphones caught his rat-a-tat exasperation, casting offices handed him every exasperated father, apoplectic tycoon, or bullfrog authority figure on the lot. Watch him unravel George Raft in She Couldn’t Take It, outwit criminals as cassocked Father Brown, or marshal the Manhattan elite as Nero Wolfe. When scripts needed a one-man cyclone, Connolly stepped in, waistcoat straining, mustache bristling like a porcupine at bay. The stage had already made him a household commodity back East: The Talking Parrot, Applesauce, The Good Fairy, and a dozen other Broadway frolics proved the squat fireplug from St. Xavier could mine gold out of boulevard fluff. Between 1920 and the stock-market crash he shared playbills—and eventually a daughter, future Peter Pan alum Ann—with actress Nedda Harrigan, his wife until the courts severed the knot on the very afternoon a stroke closed the curtain, May 28, 1940. Fifty-three years, one day of freedom, and a legacy of silver-screen apoplexy that still pops off the reel.