John Brown (1904-1957) was a beloved comedy character actor in his own time, and a bit of a legend in the biz, though his name has gone unremembered, largely one imagines because he shares it with a man of undeniably greater historical import. Just try and research a guy named John Brown, and even restrict it to the theatre and motion picture arts. There’s many a play and movie with the abolitionist’s name in it, and he appears as a character in even more.
This John Brown was born to Jewish parents (Julius and Esther) in Hull, Yorkshire, England. His mother was born in Austria. I’ve not ascertained where the father was born. Hull has long been a moderately sized but busy port and mercantile city, with a substantial Jewish community that dates to the mid 18th century. At what point the family moved to the States, I’ve not discovered, but Brown’s parents are buried in Queens. Nor have I been able to learn about Brown’s earliest years in the theatre, where he studied, and where he got his start. But I do know that once he got going in the early 1930s he made serious traction in every medium that then employed actors: Broadway, radio, movies, television, and voice-over work in animation.
Brown’s 1931 Broadway debut came in a very high level production: a version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, with a cast that included Doris Rankin, Fanny Davenport, and Walter Connelly. This is heady company; it leads to me to suspect he had good experience in stock companies prior to this. From here he went on to Peace on Earth (1933-34), put on by the left-wing Theatre Union, followed by the original Broadway production of The Milky Way (1934), soon to be a movie vehicle for Harold Lloyd.
By then, Brown had made begun to work in radio, the medium where he made his greatest success. He seems to have had regular roles on most of the hit comedy shows of the day, and guest shots on all of the others. He was a part of the ensemble on various iterations of The Fred Allen Show (1935-43), followed by The Jack Benny Program (1943-45) and its spinoff A Day in the Life of Dennis Day (1946-51), while at the same time playing various bit parts on The Abbott and Costello Show (1943-1949), and holding down regular roles on Tillie the Toiler (1942), The Charlotte Greenwood Show (1944-46), A Date with Judy (1944-51), The Life of Riley (1944-51), The Saint (1945-50, a rare non-comedy), The Adventures of Maisie (1945-52), The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1945-54), My Friend Irma (1947-54), and The Damon Runyon Theatre (1948-49).
Read that again. It boggles the mind. John Brown basically had regular, named supporting roles on a half dozen hit sitcoms at the same time. Some of these parts were major. He was Irma’s boyfriend Al on My Friend Irma, the narrator “Broadway” on the Damon Runyon show, and Riley’s best pal Digger the undertaker on The Life of Riley. Much was made in publicity at the time of the fact that Brown had been a mortician’s assistant prior to becoming an actor, though one takes publicity like that with a grain of salt, for it has the whiff of concoction. If true, it is one of the few details we know about his early years, though. (The role also makes one want to stretch for a joke about “John Brown’s Body”, though the press of the day seems to have been too classy to have gone there back then. But the Life of Riley writers often came pretty close).
Brown would go on to play Digger in both the movie and television versions of The Life of Riley as well, one of the few personnel to tie all three versions together. His TV credits were few. Other than Riley, he was known for being the middle actor to play Harry Morton on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, between Hal March and Fred Clark. He also had guest shots on I Love Lucy and The Amos and Andy Show.
Meantime, he had been a steadily working character in Hollywood films since the mid ’40s. Some were comedy classics, some just classics. His resume includes Casanova Brown (1944), Benny’s The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), Fred Allen’s It’s in the Bag (1945), Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951, as that deeply inebriated mathematician), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), Robot Monster (1953, as Ro-Man), and The Wild One (1953), and many other lesser known films.
On top of this, he provided voices in numerous cartoon shorts for Walt Disney and MGM, and returned to Broadway one last time in S.N. Behrman’s The Pirate (1942) with Lunt and Fontanne. His last major screen credit was for a voice in the 1954 cartoon Dixieland Droopy.
In 1954, Brown was called before HUAC to testify to his past associations with the Communist Party. He declined to answer as to his former membership, and was blacklisted. His only credit after this was as one of the narrators in a “documentary” called Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956).
Brown was on his way to see a doctor in May, 1957 when he died of a heart attack en route. Can you imagine the pressure of being out of work during those times with a family to support?
Brown’s son, Jared Brown was a theatre professor affiliated for many years with Illinois Wesleyan University, as well as a stage director, playwright, and author of the books The Fabulous Lunts: A Biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1986), Zero Mostel: A Biography (1989), Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life (2005), Moss Hart: A Prince of the Theater (2006), and The Theatre in America during the Revolution (2007).
For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety