Charles Butterworth

Charles Butterworth was, before he came to Hollywood in 1930, a stage attraction on Broadway. In the '30s, he had his big successes as the hero's no-nonsense best friend. He made a practice of ad-libbing dry quips and bons mots during shooting, and screenwriters took advantage of this by writing only fragments of his scripts, hoping that he would fill in the missing lines. He didn't like that very much, however, and his star began sinking in the late '30s. In the '40s, he worked for smaller studios; Warner's A production, This Is the Army (1943), was a notable exception. Two years after his last movie, Dixie Jamboree (1944) for PRC, he died in a car crash.