Wallace Beery
American actor (1885-1949)
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.
Early life
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.
“Wallace Beery” enters the record as american actor (1885-1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wallace, Beery and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wallace Beery” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wallace, Beery and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q322179. VIAF identifies the subject as 32258641. The Library of Congress control number is n80016853. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1885, 1949, 1930 and 1932.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wallace Beery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.