James Flavin

James Flavin
James Flavin in The Fabulous Dorseys (1947)
Born	James William Flavin Jr. (1906-05-14)May 14, 1906 Portland, Maine, U.S.
Died	April 23, 1976(1976-04-23) (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Ruptured aorta
Resting place	Holy Cross Cemeter in Culver City, California
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1932–1976
Spouse(s)	Lucile Browne (1932-1976, his death) (1 child)
Children	William James Flavin

James William Flavin Jr. (May 14, 1906 – April 23, 1976) was an American character actor whose career lasted for nearly half a century.

Flavin was the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English extraction and a mother, Katherine, whose father was an Anglo-Irish immigrant. Thus, Flavin, well known in Hollywood as an "Irish" type, was—ironically—only one-quarter Irish. He was born and reared in Portland, Maine, a fact that may have enriched his later working relationship with director John Ford, also a Portland native.

He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point but, contrary to some sources, did not graduate. Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland and drove a taxi. Then as now, companies flocked to Maine each year, and in 1929 Flavin was asked to fill in for an actor. He did well with the part and the company manager offered him $150 per week to accompany the troupe back to New York. Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W. 87th Street in Manhattan. Flavin didn't manage to crack Broadway at this time; his Broadway debut would not occur for another 39 years, in the 1971 revival of The Front Page, in which he played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from Robert Ryan.

Flavin worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours, arriving in Los Angeles around 1932. He quickly made the transition to movies, landing the lead role in his very first film, a Universal serial, The Airmail Mystery (1932). He also landed his leading lady, marrying the serial's female star Lucile Browne that same year. However, the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film. Thereafter, he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters, many of them without so much as a name. He specialized in uniformed cops and hard-bitten detectives, but played chauffeurs, cabbies, and even a 16th-century palace guard with aplomb.

Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971. He appeared in almost one hundred television episodes, including the NBC sitcom, The People's Choice, starring Jackie Cooper, several episodes as police Detective Sawyer who was being driven nuts by Gracie Allen on the Burns and Allen show,and three times as a sheriff on the western aviation adventure series, Sky King, before his final appearance, as U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976), a dramatization of the shooting down in 1960 by the former Soviet Union of the U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers.