Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (April 1, 1885 – April 15, 1949) was an American film and stage actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill (1930) opposite Marie Dressler, as General Director Preysing in Grand Hotel (1932), as the pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1934), as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa! (1934) for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, and his title role in The Champ (1931), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 films during a 36-year career. His contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stipulated in 1932 that he would be paid $1 more than any other contract player at the studio. This made Beery the highest-paid film actor in the world during the early 1930s. He was the brother of actor Noah Beery and uncle of actor Noah Beery Jr.
For his contributions to the film industry, Beery was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Beery was born the youngest of three boys on April 1, 1885, in Clay County, Missouri, near Smithville. The Beery family left the farm in the 1890s and moved to nearby Kansas City, Missouri, where his father was a police officer. A fourth brother, Charles, was born in 1880 but survived only a day after his birth. There might have been an older sister but information is faint.
Beery attended the Chase School in Kansas City and took piano lessons as well, but showed little love for academic matters. He ran away from home twice, the first time returning after a short time, quitting school and working in the Kansas City train yards as an engine wiper. Beery ran away from home a second time at age 16 and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later after being clawed by a leopard.
Wallace Beery joined his older brother Noah in New York City in 1904, finding work in comic opera as a baritone, and appeared on Broadway and in summer stock theatre. He was in The Belle of the West in 1905. His most notable early role came in 1907 when he starred in The Yankee Tourist to good reviews.
Comedy film star – Essanay Studios
In 1913, he moved to Chicago to work for Essanay Studios. His first movie was likely a comedy short, His Athletic Wife (1913).
Beery was then cast as Sweedie, a Swedish maid character he played in drag in a series of short comedy films from 1914 to 1916. Sweedie Learns to Swim (1914) co-starred Ben Turpin. Sweedie Goes to College (1915) starred Gloria Swanson, whom Beery married the following year.
Other Beery films (mostly shorts) from this period included In and Out (1914), The Ups and Downs (1914), Cheering a Husband (1914), Madame Double X (1914), Ain't It the Truth (1915), Two Hearts That Beat as Ten (1915), and The Fable of the Roistering Blades (1915).
The Slim Princess (1915), with Francis X. Bushman, was one of his earliest feature-length films. Beery also did The Broken Pledge (1915) and A Dash of Courage (1916), both with Swanson.
Beery played a German soldier in The Little American (1917) with Mary Pickford, directed by Cecil B. De Mille. He did some comedies for Mack Sennett, Maggie's First False Step (1917) and Teddy at the Throttle (1917), but he gradually left that genre and specialized in portrayals of villains prior to becoming a major leading man during the sound era.
In 1917, Beery portrayed Pancho Villa in Patria at a time when Villa was still active in Mexico. (Beery reprised the role 17 years later in Viva Villa!.)
Beery was a villainous German in The Unpardonable Sin (1919) with Blanche Sweet. For Paramount, he did The Love Burglar (1919) with Wallace Reid; Victory (1919), with Jack Holt; Behind the Door (1919), as another villainous German; and The Life Line (1919) with Holt.
Beery was the villain in five major releases in 1920: 813; The Virgin of Stamboul for director Tod Browning; The Mollycoddle with Douglas Fairbanks, in which Fairbanks and Beery fist fought as they tumbled down a steep mountain; and in the noncomedic Western The Round-Up starring Roscoe Arbuckle as an obese cowboy in a well-received serious film with the tagline "Nobody loves a fat man." Beery continued his villainy cycle that year with The Last of the Mohicans, playing Magua.
Beery had a supporting part in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) with Rudolph Valentino. He was a villainous Tong leader in A Tale of Two Worlds (1921) and was the bad guy again in Sleeping Acres (1922), Wild Honey (1922), and I Am the Law (1922), which also featured his brother Noah Beery Sr.
Beery had a large, then-rare part as King Richard I (Richard the Lion-Hearted) in Robin Hood (1922), starring Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. The movie did well and spawned a sequel the following year starring Beery in the title role of Richard the Lion-Hearted.
Beery had an important unbilled cameo as "the Ape-Man" in A Blind Bargain (1922) starring Lon Chaney (Beery is seen crouching, in full ape-man make-up, in the background of some of the movie's posters), and a supporting role in The Flame of Life (1923). He played another historical ruler, King Philip IV of Spain, in The Spanish Dancer (1923) with Pola Negri.
Beery starred in an action melodrama, Stormswept (1923) for FBO Films alongside Noah Beery Sr. The tagline on the movie's posters was "Wallace and Noah Beery – The Two Greatest Character Actors on the American Screen."