Bio of noah beery sr
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He became a respected character actor, adept at playing the villain.
“Noah Beery, Sr.” In Hollywood Character Actors, by James Robert Parish, 59–60. Wallace met the commitment.
Authored by
Alan Havig was a professor of history at Stephens College.
Contributed by
This article was first published in Lawrence O.
Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary R. Kremer, and Kenneth H. Winn, eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), and appears here by permission of the author and original publisher.
Further Reading
Kansas City Star, April 1, 1946.
New York Times, April 2, 1946.
“Noah Beery, Sr.” In Eighty Silent Film Stars: Biographies and Filmographies of the Obscure to the Well-Known, by George A.
Katchmer, 34–48. Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Another brother, William Beery, was also an actor of much less stature who later entered the oil business quite successfully. One of his most memorable characterizations was as Sergeant Gonzales in The Mark of Zorro (1920) opposite Douglas Fairbanks. In the sound era, Noah became chiefly a character actor; he often fell under the shadow of his more renowned brother Wallace.
There were also grapevines, avocado, orange and lemon trees. After a dozen years on the stage, he joined his brother in Hollywood in 1915 to make motion pictures.
Although his father was also named Noah Beery, the subject of this biography was known as Noah Beery Sr.; his son, who played James Garner’s father in television’s Rockford Files, was known as Noah Beery Jr.
Beery Sr. left the farm when his father became a Kansas City policeman in the 1890s, and there he and two brothers matured in the neighborhood centered in Seventeenth Street and the Paseo.
Amused by his already booming, deep voice, various actors urged him to cultivate it and go on the stage, which he did at the youthful age of 16.
Apparently, Beery was possessed of a rich singing voice, and after some lessons, performed as a singer for a year in the Kansas City area and for a week at the fashionable Hammerstein’s Resort in New York state as well as at Kansas City’s Electric Park.
Finding he preferred melodrama, he worked under the noted William Brady, scoring a moderate success in a three year tour of a “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” production with brother Wallace.
Then my dad and mother came out ahead of Wally, three years, something like that. Noah grew up on a farm in western Missouri. He reached his peak in popularity in 1930, even recording a phonograph record for Brunswick Records with songs from two of his films. The brothers were rehearsing their parts in a radio play to be broadcast later that evening.
(Working with him in pictures) was strange at first, but he could generally iron me out pretty good the night before (so) I wouldn’t make too many blunders.” As for any resentment being typecast as a heavy, Noah Jr. stated his father “loved it. Beery married actress Marguerite Abbott, his wife of thirty-six years, in 1910.
By age 23, he was touring for a year (1905-1906) with Brady’s “As Ye Sow”, eventually playing for a month on Broadway.
In 1910 Beery married Marguerite Walker Lindsey, a stage actress. Seriously ill for months, doctors advised a milder climate so the Beerys moved to Florida where Noah Sr.
made some early films and worked at any job he could find until the family finally reached California in 1917 where he found film work immediately, eventually appearing in over 110 silents.