1-629-854 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Wallace Beery (1885-1949), American actor, c1930s-c1940s. A star of many silent Hollywood films, the arrival of sound saw Beery as one of the victims of the wholesale studio purge. However, MGM executive Irving Thalberg saw something in Beery and hired him for the studio. Beery was cast in The Big House (1930), for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination. The next year Beery would win the Oscar for Best Actor in Charlie chaplin's The Champ (1931). He continued to work, appearing in only one or two pictures a year, until he died from a heart attack in 1949.