Charles Butterworth: the deadpan the city sent to Hollywood

1896 – 1946

Charles Butterworth (1896–1946): the third flagged name, entered here at Famous People size as his holding entry; the Comedy section carries his record whole, and its citations govern this condensation. Butterworth was born in South Bend on 26 July 1896, the son of a South Bend physician. Notre Dame gave him a law degree in 1924, but the law never got him: he worked as a reporter at the South Bend News-Times and left for vaudeville in 1924, reaching Broadway musicals and then Hollywood, where he played some forty films between 1929 and 1944 in a single, perfected register — the timid, befuddled, impeccably courteous little man whose politeness never saved him. The films the record keeps are Love Me Tonight (1932), Forsaking All Others (1934), Every Day's a Holiday (1937), Second Chorus (1940), and This Is the Army (1943), where he played Private Eddie Dibble. His delivery outlived him in an odd place: Daws Butler, the voice actor, took Butterworth's manner as the model for Cap'n Crunch. He was killed in an automobile accident on Sunset Boulevard in June 1946, aged forty-nine — the date prints as the conflict the record carries: 13 June 1946 in some accounts, 14 June in the New York Times obituary and the Los Angeles Times of 14 June. He is buried at St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park in Granger, and in 1960 Hollywood gave him a posthumous star on the Walk of Fame, at 7036 Hollywood Boulevard. The two firing anecdotes the Comedy record preserves print there as anecdote, in both versions; here his size is the forty films, the Notre Dame law degree he never used, and the hometown newspaper that employed him first.

Sources:

1. Comedy section of this history (banked) — the whole record, whose citations govern: the South Bend birth of 26 July 1896 and the physician father, the Notre Dame law degree of 1924, the News-Times reporting, the filmography, the Daws Butler account, the death-date conflict as printed there, the Granger burial, and the 1960 Walk of Fame star at 7036 Hollywood Boulevard.
2. New York Times, obituary, 14 June 1946 — the death as carried in the Comedy record.