Andrew Tombes

Excelling in baseball while at Phillips-Exeter academy, American comic actor Andrew Tombes determined he'd make a better living as an actor than as a ballplayer. By the time he became a headliner in the Ziegfeld Follies, Tombes had performed in everything from Shakespeare to musical comedy. He received star billing in five editions of the Follies in the '20s, during which time he befriended fellow Ziegfeldite Will Rogers. It was Rogers who invited Tombes to Hollywood for the 1935 Fox production Doubting Thomas. An endearingly nutty farceur in his stage roles, Tombes' screen persona was that of an eternally befuddled, easily aggravated business executive. The baldheaded, popeyed actor remained at Fox for several years after Doubting Thomas, playing an overabundance of police commissioners, movie executives, college deans, and Broadway "angels." Tombes' problem was that he arrived in talkies too late in the game: most of the larger roles in which he specialized usually went to such long-established character men as Walter Catlett and Berton Churchill, obliging Tombes to settle for parts of diminishing importance in the '40s. Most of his later screen appearances were unbilled, even such sizeable assignments as the would-be musical backer in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941) and the royal undertaker's assistant in Hope and Crosby's Road to Morocco (1942). Still, Tombes was given ample opportunity to shine, especially as the secretive, suicidal bartender in the 1944 "film noir" Phantom Lady. Andrew Tombes last picture was How to Be Very Very Popular (1955), which starred a colleague from his busier days at 20th Century-Fox, Betty Grable.