Robert Woolsey


Robert Rollie Woolsey was an American stage and screen comedian and half of the 1930s comedy team Wheeler & Woolsey.

Early life

Robert Rollie was born on August 14, 1888, in Carbondale, Illinois to James Monroe Woolsey and Sarah Eunice Woolsey , both also born in Illinois. Woolsey, who had brown eyes and hair with a slight and slender build tried to capitalize on his size, as a young adult, by becoming a jockey. After he fell from a horse and sustained a fractured leg, he quit racing and turned instead to the vaudeville stage. In 1925 he was featured as "Mortimer Pottle" in W. C. Fields's Broadway hit Poppy.

Wheeler and Woolsey

Woolsey was teamed with comedy star Bert Wheeler in 1928, for the Broadway musical Rio Rita. RKO Radio Pictures filmed the play in 1929, launching Wheeler and Woolsey as movie personalities. Twenty-one of the twenty-two films Woolsey made would be with his comedy partner, Wheeler.

Marriage

From 1921 to his death in 1938, Woolsey was married to Georgia girl Mignonne Park Reed, daughter of Mrs. Mary Reed also from Georgia.

Death

Woolsey became terminally ill in 1936 and struggled to finish his last picture, High Flyers, which was released in 1937. His condition forced him to sever his working relationship with Wheeler. He was then confined to bed for almost a full year, before dying of kidney failure in 1938. Robert Woolsey was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Filmography

TitleYearRoleNotes
Rio Rita1929Ned Lovett
Dixiana1930Ginger Dandy
The Cuckoos1930Professor Cunningham
Half Shot at Sunrise1930Gilbert
Hook, Line and Sinker1930Addington Ganzy
Everything's Rosie1931Dr. J. Dockweiler Droop
Caught Plastered1931Egbert G. Higginbotham
Peach O'Reno1931Julius Swift
Cracked Nuts1931Zander "Zup" Ulysses Parkhurst
Hold 'Em Jail1932Spider Robbins
Girl Crazy1932Slick Foster
Diplomaniacs1933Hercules Glub
So This Is Africa1933Alexander Woolsey
Kentucky Kernels1934"The Great" Elmer Dugan
Hips, Hips, Hooray!1934Dr. Bob Dudley
Cockeyed Cavaliers1934Robert Maltravers
The Nitwits1935Newton
The Rainmakers1935Roscoe the Rainmaker
Silly Billies1936Dr. Philip "Painless" Pennington
Mummy's Boys1936Aloysius C. Whittaker
On Again-Off Again1937Claude Horton
High Flyers1937Pierre Potkins

DVD releases

Nine of Wheeler and Woolsey's 21 movies were released in a DVD collection entitled "Wheeler & Woolsey: RKO Comedy Classics Collection" in March 2013 by Warner Archive.