In Name Only

Charles Douville Coburn was born in Macon, Georgia, on 19 June 1877, and raised in Savannah. He began working in theaters as a boy, ushering and eventually managing a Savannah playhouse before moving into acting. He spent decades on the American stage, including running his own Shakespearean touring company with his first wife, Ivah Wills Coburn, and became a respected figure in New York theater and a founder of what became The Players club scene long before Hollywood took any interest in him. Coburn did not begin appearing regularly in films until 1933, when he was already in his mid-fifties, following the death of his wife. He quickly became one of the era's most reliable character actors, specializing in blustery, monocled tycoons and grandfatherly figures whose gruffness typically concealed a soft-hearted core. His late start did not slow him: he worked steadily and prolifically through the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s. His peak years came in his sixties and seventies, when he received three consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor: for The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), for which he lost, The More the Merrier (1943), for which he won, and The Green Years (1946). He continued working in film, radio and eventually television into his eighties. Coburn died in New York City on 30 August 1961, at eighty-four, having appeared in roughly ninety films over a nearly thirty-year screen career that began only after most actors' careers were winding down.