William Demarest
William Demarest is an actor, born 1892.
Twenty years of vaudeville came before any of this. William Demarest (1892 to 1983) worked the stage for two decades before the movies, and when he did arrive he arrived early: he is in The Jazz Singer (1927), uncredited, in the picture that ended silent cinema.
What he became was one of the most reliable faces in American comedy. Preston Sturges built a stock company of character players and used Demarest more than almost anyone: Skeeters in The Great McGinty (1940), Mr. Bildocker in Christmas in July (1940), Muggsy in The Lady Eve (1941), Mr. Jones in Sullivan's Travels (1941), a charter member of the Ale and Quail Club in The Palm Beach Story (1942). Muggsy is the definitive version, a bodyguard who is right about everything and believed by nobody, played at a permanent low growl.
The face suited authority figures losing an argument. He is Bill Griffith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the police chief in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Mr. Martin in Viva Las Vegas (1964), Mr. MacDougall in Disney's That Darn Cat! (1965) and Mr. Hummel in Son of Flubber (1963).
Television gave him his largest audience last. He joined My Three Sons as Uncle Charley in 1965 and stayed until 1972, crusty and soft-centred, which is precisely the register the film work had spent forty years refining. Over 140 films, from 1926 to the late 1970s, and almost none of them starring him.
Movies (26)
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
- The Jazz Singer (1927)
- The Lady Eve (1941)
- The Far Horizons (1955)
- Country Fair (1941)
- That Darn Cat! (1965)
- Sullivan's Travels (1941)
- The Mountain (1956)
- The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
- Escape from Fort Bravo (1953)
- Son of Flubber (1963)
- Viva Las Vegas (1964)
- Fugitive Lady (1934)
- The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
- Pardon My Sarong (1942)
- Dangerous When Wet (1953)
- Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)
- The Rawhide Years (1956)
- Along Came Jones (1945)
- Christmas in July (1940)
- Easy Living (1937)
- The Great McGinty (1940)
- Pepe (1960)
- Lucy Gallant (1955)
- The Palm Beach Story (1942)
TV (4)
Where to start with William Demarest
The Lady Eve, no argument. Sturges's best comedy is close to perfect, and Demarest's Muggsy powers half the laughs, a man whose blanket suspicion of everyone is the only sane position available to him.
Then Sullivan's Travels, which is funnier and sadder than its premise promises, and The Palm Beach Story, where he is part of the most unhinged sequence in 1940s studio comedy. The Great McGinty and Christmas in July are the smaller Sturges pictures and both are worth the time. Outside that circle, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the prestige credit and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is the sprawling chase comedy where he gets to shout at everybody. My Three Sons is the television that made his face familiar to a whole generation, and The Jazz Singer is the historical curiosity, since he is in it and almost nobody notices.