Allen Jenkins (April 9, 1900 – July 20, 1974) was an American character actor on stage, screen and television. He was born David Allen Curtis Jenkins in Staten Island, New York.
He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In his first stage appearance, he danced next to James Cagney in a chorus line for an off-Broadway musical called Pitter-Patter. He made five dollars a week. He also appeared one thousand times in Broadway plays between 1924 and 1962, including The Front Page with Lee Tracy (1928). His big break came when he replaced Spencer Tracy for three weeks in the Broadway play The Last Mile.
He was called to Hollywood by Darryl F. Zanuck and signed first to Paramount Pictures and shortly afterwards to Warner Bros. He originated the character of Frankie Wells in the Broadway production of Blessed Event and reprised the role in the film adaptation, both in 1932. With the advent of talking pictures, he made a career out of playing comic henchmen, stooges, policemen and other "tough guys" in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s, especially for Warner Bros. He was labeled the "greatest scene-stealer of the 1930s" by the New York Times. He voiced the character of "Officer Dibble" on the Hanna Barbera TV cartoon, Top Cat and was a regular on the television situation comedy Hey, Jeannie! (1956), starring Jeannie Carson. He was also a guest star on The Red Skelton Show, I Love Lucy, Playhouse 90, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Zane Grey Theater, and The Sid Caesar Show. Eleven days before his death, he made his final appearance, at the end of Billy Wilder's 1974 film adaptation of The Front Page.
He went public with his alcoholism and was the first actor to speak in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate about it. He helped start the first Alcoholics Anonymous programs in California prisons for women.
Jenkins, James Cagney, Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh were the original members of the so-called "Irish Mafia". He was the seventh member of the Screen Actors Guild.
Partial filmography
Blessed Event (1932)
Three on a Match (1932)
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Lawyer Man (1933)
Hard to Handle (1933)
42nd Street (1933)
Blondie Johnson (1933)
The Mayor of Hell (1933)
Bureau of Missing Persons (1933)
Havana Widows (1933)
The Big Shakedown (1934)
I've Got Your Number (1934)
Jimmy the Gent (1934)
Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934)
The Case of the Howling Dog (1934)
The St. Louis Kid (1934)
The Case of the Curious Bride (1935)
The Irish in Us (1935)
Page Miss Glory (1935)
The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935)
Cain and Mabel (1936)
Three Men on a Horse (1936)
Marked Woman (1937)
Ever Since Eve (1937)
Ready, Willing, and Able (1937)
Marked Woman (1937)
Dead End (1937)
A Slight Case of Murder (1938)
Gold Diggers in Paris (1938)
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938)
Five Came Back (1939)
Destry Rides Again (1939)
Brother Orchid (1940)
Tin Pan Alley (1940)
Footsteps in the Dark (1941)
Dive Bomber (1941)
The Gay Falcon (1941)
Ball of Fire (1941)
A Date with the Falcon (1942)
Tortilla Flat (1942)
They All Kissed the Bride (1942)
Eyes in the Night (1942)
Wonder Man (1945)
Lady on a Train (1945)
The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947)
The Big Wheel (1949)
Chained for Life (1951)
Let's Go Navy! (1951)
Crazy Over Horses (1951)
Pillow Talk (1959)
Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964)
I'd Rather Be Rich (1964)
The Front Page (1974)
References
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Allen Jenkins
Allen Jenkins at the Internet Movie Database
Allen Jenkins at the Internet Broadway Database
Allen Jenkins at Allmovie
NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 700/1000000
Post-expand include size: 5931/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 2068/2048000 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 3/500
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Jenkins"
Categories: 1900 births | 1974 deaths | American film actors | American stage actors | American television actors | Irish-Americans | People from Staten Island | Deaths from surgical complicationsHidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since June 2008
Views
Article
Discussion
