Background
Fat O’Brien was born on 11 November 1899 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.
Fat O’Brien was born on 11 November 1899 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States.
After the war, O'Brien finished his secondary schooling at Marquette Academy and later attended Marquette University.
It had been thought that O'Brien’s movie debut was as Hildy Johnson, the reporter—a part he had played on the stage—in The Front Page (31, Lewis Milestone). But there is a Pat O’Brien who played in three earlier, and very cheap films; Shadows of the West (21, Paul Hurst); The Freckled Rascal (29, Louis Fing); and Fury of the Wild (29. Leon d’Usseau).
After The Front Page, he was an established player: Air Mail (32, John Ford); Virtue (32, Edward Buzzell); American Madness (32, Frank Capra); Laughter in Hell (33, Edward L. Calm); Destination Unknown (33, Tay Garnett); Bombshell (33, Victor Fleming); Oil for the Lamps of China (33, Mervyn Le Roy); Flirtation Walk (34, Frank Borzage): Twenty Million Sweetheaiis (34, Ray Enright); with Cagney in Here Comes the Navy (34, Lloyd Bacon); Stars Over Broadway (35, William Feighley); Devil Dogs of the Air (35, Bacon); In Caliente (35, Bacon); with Cagney again in The Irish in Us (35, Bacon) and Ceiling Zero (36, Howard Hawks); as The Great O'Malley (37, William Dieterle); as the priest watching over Cagney in Angels Writh Dirty Faces (38, Michael Curtiz); Boy Meets Girl (38, Bacon); Till We Meet Again (40, Edmund Colliding); Knute Rockne: All-American (40, Bacon); The Fighting 69th (40, Keighley); Escape to Glory (41, John Brahm); Broadway (42, William A. Seiter); His Butler's Sister (43, Borzage); Having Wonderful Crime (45, Edward Sutherland); Man Alive (45, Enright); Crack-Up (46, Irving Reis); Biff Raff (47, Ted Tetzlaff); Fighting Father Dunne (48, Tetzlaff); as Cramps in The Boy with Green IIair (48, Joseph Losey); Johnny One-Eye (50, Robert Florey); The People Against O'Hara (51. John Sturges); Ring of Fear (54, James Edward Grant); Inside Detroit (56, Fred F. Sears); The Last Hurrah (58, Ford); effortlessly knowing when raiding the speakeasy in Sonw Like It Hot (59, Billy Wilder); Town Tamer (65, Lesley Selander); The End (78, Burt Reynolds); Scout's Honor (80, Henry Levin); and Ragtime (81. Milos Forman).
When Warner Brothers were industriously covering the wrong side of the tracks in the 1930s, Pat O'Brien was their resident apologist for the social order, either as cop or priest. Always retaining a hint of his Irish origins, O'Brien brought a welcome astringency to several parts that could have been horribly pious. His partnership with James Cagney—like Guinness and bootleg hootch—was especially successful.