- Otto Fries
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Otto Fries Born October 28, 1887
St. Louis, Missouri,
United StatesDied September 15, 1938 (aged 50)
Los Angeles, California
United StatesOther names Otto H. Fries Occupation Actor Years active 1920 - 1938 Children Sherwood Fries.[1] Otto Fries (28 October 1887 – 15 September 1938) was an American film actor. He appeared in 129 films between 1920 and 1938.
Contents
Career
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Fries became a dapper-looking supporting comic with a varied background in medicine shows and vaudeville. He easily transitioned to film in the early 1910s. By 1915, he was with the Keystone Cops and entered a lifelong friendship with Stan Laurel, which led to appearances in that star comedian's early films for Bronco Billy Anderson. Not surprisingly, Fries later landed at Hal Roach Studios, where he supported not only Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase but also such lesser stars as Max Davidson and James Finlayson.
Sound proved no hindrance and Fries would appear in many of Roach's German-language talkies, as well as characters in many of the Our Gang shorts. Often cast as inebriates, detectives, and bartenders (with a memorable turn as a Blacksmith matching wits with a delinquent 9-year-old in Roach's Readin' and Writin'), Fries played scores of bit parts and walk-ons in grade-A films. One of his more notable appearances was as a shiphand in the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business.
Death
Fries died in 1938 in Los Angeles, California at age 50.
Selected filmography
- The Weak-End Party (1922)
- The Handy Man (1923)
- Hotel Imperial (1927)
- The Second Hundred Years (1927)
- Call of the Cuckoo (1927)
- Leave 'Em Laughing (1928)
- From Soup to Nuts (1928)
- Riley the Cop (1928)
- Railroadin' (1929)
- The First Seven Years (1930)
- Little Daddy (1931)
- Monkey Business (1931)
- Bargain Day (1931)
- Readin' and Writin' (1932)
- Free Eats (1932)
- The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)
- Sons o' Guns (1936)
References
- ^ US Federal Census 1930, California, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, ED 841, Sheet 9A, Line 13
External links
Categories:- 1887 births
- 1938 deaths
- American film actors
- American silent film actors
- Actors from Missouri
- American film actor, 1880s birth stubs
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