Dave Wood

As a fellow who has frittered away more than a good share of my spare time, I’ve taken a good deal of guff from friends and foes for spending so much of my time  in front of the silver screen as well as the monster known as cable TV.  I’ve watched the eyes of my friends glaze over as I extol the virtues of films like “Our Vines have Tender Grapes” or TV series like “The Waltons.” Or digging through the history of cinema to discover which actors hail from Wisconsin: Spencer Tracy. Frederic March, Fred McMurray, Don Ameche, Orson Welles, Florence Eldridge, Agnes Moorhead etc., etc., etc. 

I grew up devouring PhotoPlay magazine stories and following the antics of long forgotten stars like the Vans, Heflin and Johnson, and the dashing Robert Taylor, who grew up in Beatrice, Nebraska, and whose real name was Spangler Arlington Brugh.

More recently I’ve extended my efforts to researching the lives and cinematic careers of minor and character actors, those hard-working and underappreciated journeypersons who flesh out the movies I love and make my cinematic world go ‘round and ‘round.  Would you like to cut Claude Raines’s and Peter Lorre’s roles out of Casablanca? Or prison warden Strother Martin? Or nurse Mary Wickes out of “The Man Who Came to Dinner?”

TV series without these “minor” players? That’s like shooting fish in rain barrel: “Frasier” without father John Mahoney and his dog and his easy chair, or father Noah Beert, Jr. out of “The Rockford Files?” I rest my case. 

Last Sunday I spent all afternoon researching the career of a truly fine character actress named Ellen Corby who was born in 1911 in Racine, Wis. She first came to my attention when I began watching the much-maligned series about a family surviving the Great Depression. It’s full of excellent characters who grow with their roles as we move toward World War II. Ellen Corby plays Grandma opposite another obscure actor named Will Geer. Corby, who worked as a studio script doctor with the added responsibility of teaching the seven Walton children to act, who with the exception of “John-Boy,” HAD NEVER ACTED PROFSSIONALLY.  The Waltons are back on the tube and occasionally as adults they remember when the excellent Corby showed them the ropes, for which they seem mightily grateful.

My in-depth research discovered that after playing roles in more than 40 movies and starring as Grandma in 212 episodes of “The Waltons,” she suffered a massive stroke that left her unable to speak, but soldiered on, while still coaching the horde of kids who played alongside her and also working as a movie studio script “doctor.”

 Corby, who died 1999, never became a star, playing minor roles, sometimes in major movies, like “Madame Bovary,’’ “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Gunfighter,” and “I Remember Mama,” in which she plays a Norwegian spinster who marries an undertaker (played by Edgar Bergan!) Not all her films were major, for she played the spinster sister of a mad scientist in “The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters” in 1954. She first appeared on the Silver Screen in “The Spiral Staircase” in 1946 and her last movie was “All the Way Home.”    

Now that I’ve shown you how much I know about significant people like Ellen Corby, who’s to say I’ve frittered away my time?