Robert Greig

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Robert Greig (born December 27, 1879 in Melbourne , † June 27, 1958 in Los Angeles , California ) was an Australian actor who mainly appeared in Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, especially often in his star role as a butler .

life and career

Robert Greig was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1879. After a long career in theater throughout Australia, he moved to the United States in the 1920s, where he made his Broadway debut in the 1928 operetta Countess Maritza . He then played a supporting role in the musical Animal Crackers alongside the Marx Brothers as the self-important butler Hives. To represent this role in the film of the same name with the Marx Brothers again, Greig moved to Hollywood in 1930. The role of the butler Hives was to shape his further film career, in which he was repeatedly cast as a comedic butler or servant, for example as the servant of Kay Francis in Anger in Paradise (1932) directed by Ernst Lubitsch . In the same year, the tall, corpulent character actor with "the voice of a bellows and the face of a bullfrog " played again with the Marx Brothers as a biology professor in Blooming Nonsense

Outside of the “butler cliché” he played a British lord in Henry King's drama Signals to London (1936) and Irene Dunne's uncle in the screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild (1936). In the 1938 drama Algiers Greig was seen as the wealthy protector of Hedy Lamarr's character. Overall, his roles were mostly small, the actor only occasionally had the chance of bigger appearances. In the short film Jitters the Butler from 1932 he even took on a leading role once. In the early 1940s Greig became a member of the unofficial Preston Sturges "stock company" of character actors , a group of character actors that director Preston Sturges regularly used in his films. He played the butler of Joel McCrea in Sullivan's Travels (1941) and the member of an eccentric hunting party in Breathless to Florida (1942), both times directed by Sturges. At the end of the 1940s, Greig ended his acting career after more than 100 films, and died almost ten years later at the age of 78.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Greig at Allmovie
personal data
SURNAME Greig, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian actor
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne , Australia
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1958
Place of death Los Angeles , California