Quick Facts
Biography
Robert Rolla Woolsey (August 14, 1888 – October 31, 1938) was an American stage and screen comedian and half of the 1930s comedy team Wheeler & Woolsey.
Early life
He was born in Oakland, California. Woolsey always had a slight build, and as a young adult he tried to capitalize on it by becoming a jockey. After he fell from a horse and sustained an injury, he quit racing and turned instead to the 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. Of the twenty-two films Woolsey would make, twenty-one of them would be with his comedy partner, Wheeler.
Woolsey became terminally ill in 1937 and struggled to finish his last picture, High Flyers. 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
(As per the AFI database)
| Film title | Year | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Rio Rita | 1929 | Lovett |
| Dixiana | 1930 | Ginger |
| The Cuckoos | 1930 | Professor Bird |
| Half Shot at Sunrise | 1930 | Gilbert |
| Hook, Line and Sinker | 1930 | Addington Ganzy |
| Everything's Rosie | 1931 | Dr. J. Dockweiler Droop |
| Caught Plastered | 1931 | Egbert G. Higginbotham |
| Peach O'Reno | 1931 | Julius Swift |
| Cracked Nuts | 1931 | Zander "Zup" Ulysses Parkhurst |
| Hold 'Em Jail | 1932 | Spider Robbins |
| Girl Crazy | 1932 | Slick Foster |
| Diplomaniacs | 1933 | Hercules Glub |
| So This Is Africa | 1933 | Alexander Woolsey |
| Kentucky Kernels | 1934 | "The Great" Elmer Dugan |
| Hips, Hips, Hooray! | 1934 | Dr. Bob Dudley |
| Cockeyed Cavaliers | 1934 | Bob |
| The Nitwits | 1935 | Newton |
| The Rainmakers | 1935 | Roscoe the Rainmaker |
| Silly Billies | 1936 | Dr. Philip "Painless" Pennington |
| Mummy's Boys | 1936 | Aloysius C. Whittaker |
| On Again-Off Again | 1937 | Claude (Augustus) Horton |
| High Flyers | 1937 | Pierre Potkins |
Personal life
From 1921 to his death in 1938, Woolsey was married to Mignonne Park Reed, who lived on to age 94.
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.
{U.S. Census Records indicate he was born in Carbondale, Jackson Co, IL}