Celebrity Biographies
James Gleason
His face is quite familiar to fans of classic movies. He played numerous secondary roles under the orders of the greats among the greats (John Ford, Elia Kazan or Frank Capra). Specializing in warm-hearted characters, James Gleason was also a co-writer and playwright.
Born on May 23, 1882, his parents, William Gleason and Mina Crolius, were stage actors. As a young man he fought in the Cuban war against Spain. When the conflict ended, he joined the Liberty Theater theater company, where his parents worked.
James Gleason married Lucile Webster, also an actress, in 1905, who would thereafter officially use his married name, Lucile Gleason , and who would subsequently appear with him in several films.
After fighting in another war, World War I, and after a series of theatrical tours, James Gleason made his film debut with very minor roles. He made his first two films in the silent era: Polly of the Follies , 1922, and The Count of Ten , 1928. He played a very small role in The Broadway Melody , where he also served as a screenwriter . It was the second film to win the Oscar in the highest category.
In the 1930s he wrote numerous plays, including The Shannons of Broadway , which was very successful on the New York stage and was adapted into a film by Emmett J. Flynn, starring him and his wife, Lucile Gleason. Director Ray McCarey shot a remake in 1938.
The teacher John Ford recruited him to play a small part in the drama Peace on Earth , from 1934. Although he rarely appeared, Ford had such fond memories of him that he called on his services again in What Price Glory , where he played a general . Their last collaboration together was in El último Hurra , from 1958. Frank Capra hired him for Juan Nadie and turned him into a policeman in the legendary Arsenic for Pity . He was directed by Elia Kazan in Human Bonds .
In 1934 he starred in Murder on the Blackboard , an intrigue film, with comic elements, in which he played inspector Oscar Piper. He returned to embody the character in four more films. He received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Departed Protest , where he was a boxing trainer who was tasked with helping his protégé, mistakenly thrown into some kind of limbo.
Gleason and his wife had only one son, Russell Gleason , who also took up acting in his youth, but died early, accidentally falling from a hotel window.
The actor was active until the late 70s, with movies like I am the father and the mother , starring Jerry Lewis , where he was a doctor, or The Night of the Hunter , the legendary thriller directed by Charles Laughton . There he was the endearing Uncle Birdie, who drank like a Cossack. He is the prototype of the characters he used to play: good-hearted men.
James Gleason’s last film was Money, Women and Guns , a second-rate Western. Shortly after finishing it, he died of an asthma attack on April 12, 1959.