Charley Grapewin Trailers
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere TrailerThe Dark Side of the Rainbow TrailerGoing Hollywood: The '30s Trailer
Charles Ellsworth Grapewin (December 20, 1869 – February 2, 1956) was an American vaudeville performer, writer and a stage and silent and sound actor, and comedian who was best known for portraying Aunt Em's husband, Uncle Henry in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's The Wizard of Oz (1939) as well as Grandpa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1941). He usually portrayed elderly folksy-type characters in a rustic setting, in all appearing in over 100 films. He was the oldest cast member of The Wizard of Oz.
Born in Xenia, Ohio, Charles Ellsworth Grapewin ran away from home to be a circus acrobat which led him to work as an aerialist and trapeze artist in a traveling circus before turning to acting. He traveled all over the world with the famous P. T. Barnum circus. Grapewin also appeared in the original 1903 Broadway production of The Wizard of Oz, 36 years before he would appear in the famous Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film version.
After this he continued in theatre, on and offstage, for the next thirty years, starting with various stock companies, and wrote stage plays as a vehicle for himself. His sole Broadway theatre credit was the short-lived play It's Up to You John Henry in 1905.
Grapewin married actress Anna Chance (1875–1943) in 1896, and they remained a devoted couple until her death some 47 years later. Two years after his first wife's death, Grapewin married Loretta McGowan Becker on Jan 10, 1945.
Grapewin began in silent films at the turn of the twentieth century. His very first films were two "moving image shorts" made by Frederick S. Armitage and released in November 1900; Chimmie Hicks at the Races (also known as Above the Limit) and Chimmie Hicks and the Rum Omelet, both shot in September and October 1900 and released in November of that year. During his long career, Grapewin appeared in more than one hundred films, including The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road, and in what is probably his best-remembered role: Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz. He also had a recurring role as Inspector Queen in the Ellery Queen film series of the early 1940s.
Grapewin died of natural causes in Corona, California at age 86, and his ashes are interred with his wife's in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, at the Great Mausoleum's Columbarium of Inspiration.
Most Popular Charley Grapewin Trailers
Total trailers found: 104
26 January 1934
Mazie, a poor orphan girl, is mistreated by cruel farmer Slag and his wife for whom she works. Mazie, who is growing into a woman, does not like they way Slag has been looking at her lately.
21 August 1939
Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives.
21 October 1938
To stop Pinkie's widowed, struggling mother Dottie from marrying a well-off older man they know she doesn't love, teenager Pinkie and her best friend Buzz kidnap her in the family travel trailer to live a carefree life on the open road.
30 November 1940
Famed detective and crime novelist Ellery Queen solves a case involving the suspicious death of a rich man whose inheritors fight over his estate.
19 April 1940
Wall Street broker Robert Cain, Sr., is jailed for embezzling. His college graduate son Bob then turns to crime to raise money for his father's release.
22 October 1936
At Portland, Oregon, playboy pilot Len Kendrick lands at the end of a cross-country record flight, met by his father J.
18 December 1936
A young lawyer is determined to identify who is murdering members of a wealthy New York publishing family.
01 January 1984
Robert Preston hosts this documentary that shows what people of the 1930s were watching as they were battling the Depression as well as eventually getting ready for another World War.
29 January 1942
Amateur sleuth Ellery Queen learns the truth about a businessman's two long-lost daughters.
19 April 1951
Josh is a young boy who feels neglected and misunderstood at home. Preparing to run away, he chances across an old diary once kept by his grandfather.
01 June 1934
A young man from a small town hits New York City, bound and determined to become a radio star. Amazingly, he achieves his ambition, but in the process alienates everyone around him with his arrogance and egomania.
30 July 1942
Detective Ellery Queen aids Free Dutch agents battle Nazi spies over a prize of industrial diamonds.
13 October 1939
The night before his grandson, Tommy Grayson, a mechanic at the Midland Aircraft Corporation, is to marry Gail, a former showgirl, Major Matt Grayson, a war veteran and watchman at the plant, catches two men breaking into the machine shop.
15 February 1936
A Missouri farmer's (Lionel Barrymore) son (Eric Linden) loves the daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) of a neighbor who has killed the farmer's foxhound.
05 February 1934
When her husband, who founded the town's crusading local newspaper, doesn't come back from the French battlefields of World War I, a woman struggles to raise her two sons and keep the newspaper going.
27 August 1937
A power-company troubleshooter has his brother get him out of prison by running high voltage to the bars of his cell.
30 January 1932
A teenager lands in a brutal reform school for refusing to squeal on his bootlegger boss.
14 May 1932
Tony, the son of Italian immigrants, works in a smoky steel mill in Gary, Indiana. He wins a company scholarship which will enable him to attend Yale college.
02 September 1964
Film clips highlight the funniest scenes and brightest comic stars in MGM's history.
01 May 1935
Eccentric tycoon Jasper Whyte hosts a dinner at his mansion and announces that he will divide his money and give each guest a million dollars before the stroke of midnight.
15 March 1940
Tom Joad returns to his home after a jail sentence to find his family kicked out of their farm due to foreclosure.
17 February 1933
The setting is a farm. Kate Smith and Sally Blane play sisters; assorted relatives live with the sisters, but everyone at home, and in the whole town, depends on Kate to hold everything together.
02 September 1938
A small-town country homebody goes to New York to find her missing fiancé and gets romantically involved with two sophisticated men.
09 October 1936
When a major newspaper accuses wealthy socialite Connie Allenbury of being a home-wrecker, and she files a multi-million-dollar libel lawsuit, the publication's frazzled head editor, Warren Haggerty, must find a way to turn the tables on her.
06 October 1939
When a night watchman is mistaken for a wealthy college alumnus, his family and friends help him go along with the pretense.
01 May 1931
A millionaire automaker retires upon the advice of his doctor, but becomes so bored he buys half interest in a gas station and works it on the sly.
07 May 1942
A man is framed for embezzlement and runs off to San Francisco. His wife hires Ellery Queen to try and track him down before the police get to him.
25 November 1932
Chane Weymer, an Arizona rancher, goes after a gang that is trapping wild horses by the use of barbed-wire enclosures.
14 August 1941
Several days after one of his company's dams burst, ruining the life savings of several investors, a shady power company president is found stabbed to death.
17 September 1932
Elna Curry, once a concert pianist, develops an unfounded jealousy of neighbor, Trudie Morrow. Elna who suffers from neurasthenia, believes that Trudie is having an affair with her husband, John, and vows revenge on Trudie.
15 July 1947
Gunfighter "Brazos" Kane lays aside his guns "forever" when he is forced to shoot his best friend, and decides to join another friend, Bob Tyrell, as a cowhand on the Inskip ranch.
30 December 1936
Flubs and bloopers that occurred on the set of some of the major Warner Bros. pictures of 1936.
13 December 1940
With thousands of cattle being rustled from White Sage ranch the 1930's Texas Rangers are called in. They manage to get one of their agents into the gang by making them think he is the Pecos Kid on the lam.
11 November 1933
Alison Drake, the tough-minded executive of an automobile factory, succeeds in the man's world of business until she meets an independent design engineer.
24 March 1941
Ventriloquist and world traveler Gordon Cobb is murdered by a gang of jewel thieves. Baffled by the contradictory clues, Inspector Queen asks his son, Ellery, to help out.
17 November 1934
The President Vanishes, released in the United Kingdom as Strange Conspiracy, is a 1934 American political drama film directed by William A.
10 March 1932
Loud-mouth hamburger flipper, Cooky, thinks he can box. His big chance comes when everyone else quits the gym when it is inherited by a dame.
28 August 1940
Popular songwriter Oliver Courtney has been getting by for years using one ghost writer for his music and another for his lyrics.
07 July 1934
"The Terror", a killer whose identity is unknown, occupies an English country house that has been converted into an inn.
05 May 1944
During World War II, all the studios put out "all-star" vehicles which featured virtually every star on the lot--often playing themselves--in musical numbers and comedy skits, and were meant as morale-boosters to both the troops overseas and the civilians at home.
13 January 1939
An auto mechanic suspects sabotage in a recent series of fatal racecar accidents.
25 August 1933
While recuperating in a hospital after he's hit by an automobile, a struggling shopowner dreams what his life might have been like if he'd made different choices twenty years earlier.
07 October 1933
At the height of the Great Depression, Tommy's mother has been out of work for months when Eddie's father loses his job.
22 April 1943
A US Navy submarine, the USS Corsair, is operating in the North Atlantic, hunting German merchant raiders that are preying on Allied shipping.
03 August 1949
Novelist Will James, a specialist in horse stories, wrote the yarn upon which 20th Century-Fox's Sand was based.
06 June 1940
A murdered man helps his widow bring his killer to justice.
20 November 1941
The story follows General George Armstrong Custer's adventures from his West Point days to his death.
31 December 1937
A ruthless outlaw becomes very protective of a prizefighter when he learns the young man is his own son.
30 December 1934
A countess marries a Gypsy fiddler instead of a baron's son at harvest time in Tokay wine country, Hungary.
17 June 1933
World War I veteran Tom Holmes is marked by the unbearable suffering caused by his battle wounds. Over the years, he comes to experience both the pain of misfortune and a love for other human beings.
25 June 1937
Harvey, the arrogant and spoiled son of an indulgent absentee-father, falls overboard from a transatlantic steamship and is rescued by a fishing vessel on the Grand Banks.
20 February 1941
Shiftless Jeeter Lester and his family of sharecroppers live in rural Georgia where their ancestors were once wealthy planters.
02 June 1937
China, during the rule of the Qing Dynasty. The arranged marriage between Wang Lung, a humble farmer, and O-Lan, a domestic slave, will endure the many hardships of life over the years; but the temptations of a fragile prosperity will endanger their love and the survival of their entire family.
16 May 1976
Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire present more golden moments from the MGM film library, this time including comedy and drama as well as classic musical numbers.
31 March 1939
Promises of happier times dawn for the financially distressed Patterson family when father Sweeney and brother-in-law Archibald "Doc" Finney win a $150,000 grand prize in the sweepstake contest.
25 October 1935
A decoding expert tangles with enemy spies.
09 July 1932
An honest, talented and well respected attorney defeats a corrupt incumbent U.S. Senator. After a very good start he has to face the subtle temptations and innocent looking traps of Washington.
08 February 1936
Gabby, the waitress in an isolated Arizona diner, dreams of a bigger and better life. One day penniless intellectual Alan drifts into the joint and the two strike up a rapport.
15 September 1934
Judge Priest, a proud Confederate veteran, restores the justice in a small town in the Post-Bellum Kentucky using his common sense and his great sense of humanity.
26 April 1934
"Duke" Gordon (Robert Armstrong), a circus lion-tamer, tries to tames his wife, Laura (Sally Eilers), just as he does his lions.
