Character Actors of Classic Hollywood: The Familiar Faces Behind the Stars

In 1939, the year many fans call Hollywood’s greatest, Thomas Mitchell appeared in Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Only Angels Have Wings and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was not the star of any of them. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Stagecoach, as the whiskey-soaked Doc Boone, and most audiences of the time would have recognized his face long before they could have told you his name. That was the job description of the studio-era character actors, and the best of them did it so well that the films are unimaginable without them.

This is a tribute to some of those faces: who they were, the roles that define them, and why they matter. If you want the leading men they supported, see our guide to old Hollywood actors.

What character actors did for the studios

The studio system needed hundreds of features a year, and every one of them needed a sheriff, a landlady, a crooked politician, a fussy hotel clerk or a loyal sidekick. The major studios kept supporting players under contract or hired them again and again, and audiences learned to read them instantly. When Eugene Pallette’s frog-voiced bulk appeared, you knew you were looking at an exasperated rich father. When Franklin Pangborn sniffed at someone across a reception desk, the scene was already funny.

The Academy recognized the work fairly late. The supporting acting categories were first awarded for films of 1936, and the first Best Supporting Actor winner was Walter Brennan.

Walter Brennan: three Oscars in five years

Brennan won Best Supporting Actor for Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938) and The Westerner (1940), making him the first actor to win three Academy Awards for acting. He was only in his forties at the time, but he specialized in grizzled old men, often playing parts decades older than himself. Howard Hawks used him memorably in To Have and Have Not (1944) and Rio Bravo (1959), where his cranky deputy Stumpy nearly walks off with the film.

Claude Rains: the elegant scene-stealer

Rains made his Hollywood name in The Invisible Man (1933), a starring role in which you barely see his face. He then became the classiest supporting actor in the business. He was nominated four times for Best Supporting Actor, for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Casablanca (1942), Mr. Skeffington (1944) and Notorious (1946), and never won. His Captain Renault in Casablanca, cheerfully corrupt and quietly decent, gets many of the film’s best lines, and our look at Casablanca explains why the supporting cast is a big part of its staying power.

The Warner Bros. rogues’ gallery

Peter Lorre had already given one of the great performances in film history, as the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), before he left Europe. In Hollywood he became a specialist in nervous, perfumed villains and odd little men, including Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Ugarte in Casablanca. In the late 1930s he even headlined Fox’s Mr. Moto detective series.

Sydney Greenstreet had a long stage career behind him when he made his film debut as Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, at the age of 61. The role earned him an Oscar nomination, and he and Lorre became a recurring double act at Warner Bros. through the 1940s.

Elisha Cook Jr. completed the set as the twitchy young gunsel Wilmer in the same film. He spent decades playing doomed small-timers in noir and westerns, including The Big Sleep (1946), Shane (1953) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). If you are working through our list of the best film noir movies, you will keep running into him.

The women who carried the scenes

Thelma Ritter came to films late, in the late 1940s, and became the definitive wisecracking working-class New Yorker. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress six times, for All About Eve (1950), The Mating Season (1951), With a Song in My Heart (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Pillow Talk (1959) and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), without a win. Her nurse in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) was not even nominated, and it may be her best-loved role.

Agnes Moorehead was part of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre company and came with him to RKO, playing Kane’s mother in Citizen Kane (1941) and earning an Oscar nomination for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Television viewers later knew her as Endora in Bewitched.

Hattie McDaniel made history when she won Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind (1939), becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award. The roles open to her in that era were narrow and stereotyped, and her career is now discussed as much for what Hollywood denied her as for what she achieved within it.

Beulah Bondi was the screen’s favorite mother, playing James Stewart’s mother in several films including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Her finest role is probably the elderly wife in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a small, heartbreaking film that deserves a wider audience.

A quick reference

The comedy specialists

Comedy depended on character actors even more than drama did. Edward Everett Horton perfected the double take as Fred Astaire’s flustered friend in Top Hat (1935) and other RKO musicals. Eugene Pallette played the bellowing millionaire father in My Man Godfrey (1936) and The Lady Eve (1941), and a memorable Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Margaret Dumont was the immovable society matron who absorbed Groucho Marx’s insults across seven Marx Brothers films. Charles Coburn won Best Supporting Actor for The More the Merrier (1943), a wartime comedy about the Washington housing shortage.

One film, a dozen familiar faces

The easiest way to appreciate this tradition is to pick a single studio film and look past the stars. Casablanca is the classic example. Beyond Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman you get Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, plus Conrad Veidt as the German Major Strasser, S. Z. Sakall as the waiter Carl, and Dooley Wilson as Sam at the piano. Many of the supporting players were themselves refugees from Europe, which gives the café scenes an authenticity no casting office could have planned.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) works the same way. Frank Morgan, an MGM contract player, took on the Wizard and several other small roles in the same film, and Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West became one of the most famous villains in movie history, though Hamilton spent most of her career in modest supporting parts.

John Ford’s stock company

Some directors built their own repertory. John Ford used Ward Bond in more than twenty films, from cavalry sergeants to the preacher-captain of The Searchers (1956), and Frank Capra cast him as Bert the cop in It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford’s films also rely on familiar faces such as Victor McLaglen and Andy Devine, and part of the pleasure of watching a run of them is recognizing the same company of players in different hats and uniforms.

Why they still matter

Character actors were the connective tissue of classic Hollywood. They gave a studio picture texture and a sense of a populated world, they could establish a scene’s tone in a single line, and they made the stars look better by giving them something solid to play against. Watching for them is also one of the great pleasures of classic film fandom. Once you know Thomas Mitchell, you start seeing him everywhere, and each appearance feels like running into an old friend.

If you have ever played the game of spotting the same face in five films in one night, you already understand the appeal. Next time, keep a notebook and count how many of these names you can find in a single weekend of old movies.