Lester Dorr

Lester Dorr
Dorr (left) with fellow actor Huey White in a scene from Union Depot, 1932
Born	Harry Lester Dorr (1893-05-08)May 8, 1893 Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Died	August 25, 1980(1980-08-25) (aged 87) Los Angeles, California, United States
Years active	1917-1975
Spouse(s)	Grace L. Painter (1920–1980; his death)

Lester Dorr (born Harry Lester Dorr; May 8, 1893-August 25, 1980) was an American actor who between 1917 and 1975 appeared in well over 500 productions on stage, in feature films and shorts, and in televised plays and weekly series. His extensive filmography attests to his versatility as a supporting actor and reliability as a bit player. Although Dorr's screen roles are at times credited, the great majority of his work is uncredited, consisting of characters who have limited dialogue or appear briefly as extras.

Harry Lester Dorr was born in Massachusetts in 1893, the oldest of 11 children of Mary E. (née McGinnis) and Edward Peter Dorr. Documents in Cambridge record that Dorr was born there, but his parents soon moved to the nearby town of Lynn, where his father worked as a shoemaker or "laster". By 1900, the growing Dorr family moved from Lynn into Boston. Little more is known about Lester's early life until 1917, when the United States entered World War I and Dorr registered for the military draft. He was living then in Chicago, and on his registration papers he identified his occupation as "Theatre Producer", indicating that he was already involved in or was pursuing a career in entertainment by that time. Still, Dorr identifying himself as a producer in 1917 might be attributed to youthful exaggeration or was an unrealized intention, for no subsequent references have been found that credit or even mention Dorr in that behind-the-scenes role during his career.

Dorr married in 1920 and during the late 1920s, before moving to California to act in films, he worked in stage productions in New York, including in Broadway dramas and musicals. He performed, for example, assorted roles in the 1927 revue Rufus LeMaire's Affairs; and the following year he portrayed Captain DeJean in the operetta The New Moon, which premiered at the Imperial Theatre in Manhattan on September 19, 1928.