Robert Greig, Movie Butler
It’s still cold. It grates on the nerves, this May cold — down in the 40s during the day, a frost tonight. It’s supposed to warm up this weekend, but still. A lost warm day in May isn’t replaced by one in November.
Knowledge grows tangentially. At least for me, with a good reference work at hand. That used to be dictionaries and other books; now it includes the Internet. Last week as I was tooling around the Internet Movie Database’s entry for Animal Crackers (see April 29), I chanced across the career of Robert Greig, as described there. He played Hives the butler in the movie, which apparently was his first talkie, and one of his first movies, period. It was a charming supporting role, occasionally as funny as anything the Marx Brothers did in the movie.
The imdb says he was born in 1879, another site says 1880, but both agree he was Australian. His life before about age 50 is mostly unrecorded, at least in my cursory look around the Internet, though I’ll bet he takes up a paragraph or two in a film book or two, the sort found in specialized libraries and film-aficionado bookstores (or my friend Kevin’s collection). I imagine he was a stage actor, perhaps in parts of the Commonwealth before drifting to the States and that new employer of actors, movies. So his life after 50 earned him more notoriety than 99.9+% of the human species gets, assuming that notoriety, especially posthumous kind, means anything anyway.
After his part in Animal Crackers, and probably mostly because of the role, he seems to have found his niche. According to the imdb, a lot of his other parts until the late 1940s (he died in 1958) were along these lines: Charles, the butler; Jenkins, the butler; Vance, the butler; Jules, the valet; Oscar, the majordomo; Red Apple Inn majordomo; Brearly, Boulton’s butler; Henderson, Dearden’s butler. (He did have other parts, however, including “Eunuch” in Arabian Nights.) I like to think that he made a nice living from his butler-heavy looks, affected British accent, and ability to conjure a cinematic gentleman’s gentleman.
posted by Dees Stribling @ 10:24 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I don't doubt that Mr. Grieg made a better living pretending to be a butler than he would have had he actually been a butler. When Hattie McDaniel was critized for playing mammies and maids in the movies, she is supposed to have responded that she could be a maid and make $9.00 a week, or pretend to be a maid and make $900.00 a week. Thinking of the implication of the last sentence of your posting, a "gentleman's gentleman" is a valet and not a butler; not that I've every employed - or even met - any of either. Aleksei
Notoreity? or mere fame?
Geof
PS Just so I have something to comment about, but there is a disappearing distinction between the two words.
My sense is that the connection between notorious and notoreity is waning; and that the sense of notoreity is evolving into mild fame. Fame's too strong for Robert Greig, I think, and noteworthiness doesn't seem right either. I stand corrected on a "gentleman's gentleman." I've never met one either. They might be like in the movies for all I know.
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