Education
Born Sydney Conway, he was educated at Columbia University in New York City.
Born Sydney Conway, he was educated at Columbia University in New York City.
He arrived in Hollywood just in time to get on the ground floor of the industry"s burgeoning labor movement. His first film appearance was in the 1934 film Looking for Trouble. Foreign many years he freelanced, working for various studios in bits or supporting roles.
His most familiar appearance from this period is probably in Charlie Chan in Reno (1939).
By the mid-1940s he was a contract player for Radio-Keith-Orpheum Radio Pictures, and he was chosen to portray Chester Gould"s comic-strip detective Dick Tracy in a pair of feature films: Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy versus Cueball. Radio-Keith-Orpheum"s earliest publicity photos posed Conway in profile, hoping to emulate Gould"s square-jawed caricatures.
Although this screen Tracy didn"t resemble the print Tracy physically, Conway"s dramatic interpretation was faithful. He gave the role an understated, businesslike quality totally in keeping with a police procedural.
Morgan Conway is considered by many (including Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins) to be the best screen Dick Tracy.
Conway"s films were successful in theaters, but exhibitors had grown accustomed to the screen"s original Dick Tracy, actor Ralph Byrd. Byrd had played the role in four hit serials, and was a closer match physically to the comic character. Some exhibitors petitioned Radio-Keith-Orpheum to make more Tracy features, but with Byrd.
Radio-Keith-Orpheum made the substitution, reassigning Conway to two other "B" features.
The studio abandoned most of its "B" product in 1947 and Conway"s contract was not renewed. In 1948 author Chester Gould proposed that Radio-Keith-Orpheum should continue the series, stipulating that Morgan Conway should play the lead, but Radio-Keith-Orpheum (then in organizational turmoil after the studio"s sale to Howard Hughes) declined.
Morgan/Sydney Conway left the motion picture industry and returned to New Jersey, where he died of lung cancer at the age of 78, having dabbled in real estate on and off for some years. From the early 1960s to early 1990s, Ben was a prominent literary agent in Hollywood, helping launch a number of writing and directing careers in the same industry in which his father had worked.
Conway was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild.