Henry Travers

Travers John Heagerty, working as Henry Travers, was an English stage and film actor who spent the back half of his life in Hollywood playing decent, slightly bumbling older men, and did it so well that the type is now hard to imagine without him. He was in his late fifties when The Invisible Man opened in 1933 and in his seventies by It's a Wonderful Life in 1946, which means the entire screen career people know took place in what most professions would call retirement.

Count the professions in his credits and the studio system's thinking becomes visible. Dr. Cranley in The Invisible Man. Dr. Parsons in Dark Victory. Dr. Irving in Dodge City. Dr. Evans in On Borrowed Time. Dr. Sims in Random Harvest. A professor in Ball of Fire, a reverend in The Rains Came, a father in Shadow of a Doubt. When a script needed somebody the audience would believe without argument, Travers was the answer, and he made reassurance active rather than passive, fussing and hesitating his way to the line that resolves the scene.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting work in Mrs. Miniver in 1942. The role that outlasted everything, though, is Clarence Odbody, the guardian angel of It's a Wonderful Life, a part built entirely on the audience trusting an old man they have known for four minutes.