Harry Davenport (actor)

Harry Davenport
Harry Davenport (1930s)
Born	Harold George Bryant Davenport (1866-01-19)January 19, 1866 Canton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	August 9, 1949(1949-08-09) (aged 83) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1871–1949
Spouse(s)	Alice Davenport (1893–1896; divorced) Phyllis Rankin (1896–1934; her death)

Harold George Bryant "Harry" Davenport (January 19, 1866 – August 9, 1949) was an American film and stage actor who worked in show business from the age of six until his death. After a long and prolific Broadway career, he came to Hollywood in the 1930s and appeared in films including Gone with the Wind (1939), where he portrayed Dr. Meade. His specialty was playing grandfathers, judges, doctors, and ministers. Bette Davis called Davenport "without a doubt, (...) the greatest character actor of all time."

Davenport was born in Canton, Pennsylvania, where his family lived during the holidays. He also grew up in Philadelphia. Harry came from a long line of stage actors; his father was the famed thespian Edward Loomis Davenport and his mother, Fanny Vining, was an English actress descendant of the renowned 18th century Irish stage actor, Jack Johnson. His sister was actress Fanny Davenport. He made his stage debut at the age of five in the play Damon and Pythias. Davenport made his Broadway debut in 1894 and appeared there in numerous plays.

Harry Davenport was one of the best-known and busiest "old men" in Hollywood films during the 1930s and 1940s. He started his film career at the age of 48. His film debut came in 1914 with silent film Too Many Husbands, in which he played a man trying to keep his love-struck nephew away from a young woman he had raised as his daughter. Later that same year, he starred in Fogg's Millions co-starring Rose Tapley. The film would go on to become the first in a series of silent comedy shorts. In addition, he also directed eleven silent features during the pre-World War I era, including many of the films in the Mr. and Mrs. Jarr series.

Harry Davenport appeared in three films which won the Academy Award for "Best film": William Dieterles film biography The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Frank Capras You Can't Take it With You (1938) starring Jean Arthur and James Stewart, and as Dr. Meade in Gone with the Wind (1939). Some of his other film roles are a lone resident in a ghost town in The Bride Came C.O.D. (1942), filmed on location in Death Valley, and the aged Louis XI of France in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) with Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara. He also had supporting roles in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), William A. Wellman's western The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) and in Kings Row (1943) with Ronald Reagan. Davenport also played the grandfather of Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli's classic Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and the great-uncle of Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947). His last film, Frank Capra's Riding High (1950), was released after his death.