Charles Coburn

Charles Coburn began sweeping out a Savannah theatre as a boy and worked his way up to running his own touring Shakespearean company, spending decades as a distinguished man of the American stage. Like several of the finest character actors, he came to the movies late, only settling into a Hollywood career in his late fifties, and promptly made himself indispensable as the era's favorite lovable old rogue.

With his round face, his ever-present monocle and a chuckle that suggested he knew a delicious secret, Coburn specialized in wealthy, meddlesome, warmhearted patriarchs. He was at his best in the sophisticated comedies of the early 1940s. In Preston Sturges's "The Lady Eve" (1941) he was Colonel Harrington, the cardsharp father of con-woman Barbara Stanwyck, all silky roguery. In "The Devil and Miss Jones" (1941) he played a tyrannical department-store magnate who goes undercover among his own employees and is humanized by them.

His crowning success came with "The More the Merrier" (1943), the wartime housing comedy in which he plays a matchmaking older gentleman crammed into a shared Washington apartment. His mischievous performance won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and it is a small masterpiece of comic timing and twinkle. He earned two further nominations across his career, a remarkable haul for a man who arrived on screen so late.

Coburn moved with ease between comedy and gravity, lending fatherly authority to dramas like "Kings Row" (1942) and cheerful mischief to musicals like "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953), where he sparred delightfully with Marilyn Monroe. Whatever the picture, he brought the ripe, unhurried authority of a man who had spoken Shakespeare to audiences for forty years.

He kept working almost to the end, dying in 1961 in his eighties. His off-screen views could be as antique as his monocle, but on screen he was pure pleasure, a reminder that the movies needed their genial elders as much as their young lovers. Coburn made avuncular mischief into an art, and he remains the model of the sly, benevolent old man who steals every scene he ambles into.