Background
Charles Coburn was born on 19 june 1877 in Savannah, Georgia, United States.
Charles Coburn was born on 19 june 1877 in Savannah, Georgia, United States.
Only at the age of fifty-eight did Coburn weary of the life of a traveling player and turn himself into a character actor for the movies. He had been on the stage since the 1890s and, with his wife, had formed a touring Shakespeare company. But he settled into movies like an old man relaxing in a comfortable armchair in the club library.
He was, invariably, a benign, elderly spectator, bewildered by energetic comedy, with a favorite trick of having his monocle pop out when he was startled. There was never a trace of rhetoric, but a most subtle comic timing, brought to a fine pitch in Monkey Business (52, Howard Hawks) when his senile businessman scents monkey glands in the air and feels the primordial urge whenever Marilyn Monroe fluctuates past. “Look at that old chimp. Miss Laurel,” says Coburn. “Eighty-four years old. Fourteen years older than I am! And just look at him!” In fact, Cobum was only nine years younger than the chimp, but still hopeful enough to make the laurels wobble.
Coburn worked especially hard during the 1940s and never let a film down: The People’s Enemy (35, Crane Wilbur); Of Human Hearts (38, Clarence Brown); Vivacious Lady (38, George Stevens); Lord Jeff (38, Sam Wood); Bachelor Mother (39, Garson Kanin); Idiot’s Delight (39, Brown); Made for Each Other (39, John Cromwell); Stanley and Livingstone (39, Henry King); In Name Only (39, Cromwell); The Road to Singapore (40, Victor Schertzinger); Edison, the Man (40, Brown); glorious at the card table in The Lady Eve (41, Preston Sturges); The Devil and Miss Jones (41, Wood); Our Wife (41, John M. Stahl); H. M. Pulliam Esq. (41, King Vidor); Kings Row (42, Wood); In This Our Life (42, John Huston); George Washington Slept Here (42, William Keighley); the supporting actor Oscar for The More the Merrier (43, Stevens) and very good at the physical comedy; The Constant Nymph (43, Edmund Colliding); Heaven Can Wait (43, Ernst Lubitseh); Princess O'Rourke (43, Norman Krasna); My Kingdom for a Cook (43, Richard Wallace); Wilson (44, King); Knickerbocker Holiday (44, Harry Brown); The Impatient Years (44, Irving Cummings); A Royal Scandal (45, Otto Preminger); Rhapsody in Blue (45, living Rapper); Over 21 (45, Charles Vidor); Colonel Effing-ham’s Raid (45, living Pichel); The Green Years (46, Victor Saxille); Lured (47, Douglas Sirk); The Paradine Case (47, Alfred Hitchcock); B.F.’s Daughter (48, Robert Z. Leonard); Everybody Does It (49, Colliding); Louisa (50, Alexander Hall); Mr Music (51, Richard Haydn); The Highwayman (52, Lesley Selander); Has Anybody Seen My GalP (52, Sirk); still marveling at the prospect of Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (53, Hawks); Trouble Along the Way (53, Michael Curtiz); The Long Wait (54, Saville); How to be Very, Very Popular (55, Nunnally Johnson); The Power and the Prize (56, Henrv Koster); Town on Trial (57, John Guillermin), as a villain; as Benjamin Franklin in John Paul Jones (59, John Farrow'); and Pepe (60, George Sidney).