James Flavin

Known for ActingBorn 1906-05-14Died 1976-04-23Portland, Maine, USA

American character actor whose career lasted nearly half a century. James Wilson Flavin Jr. was the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English extraction and a mother, Katherine, whose father was an Irish immigrant. (Thus Flavin, well-known in Hollywood as an "Irish" type, was only one-quarter Irish.) Flavin was born and raised in Portland, Maine (a fact that may have enrichened his later working relationship with director John Ford, also a Portland native). He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but (contrary to some sources) did not graduate. Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland where he drove a taxi. Then as now, summer stock companies flocked to Maine each year, and in 1929 he was asked to fill in for an actor. He did well with the part and the company manager offered him $150 per week to go with the troupe back to New York. Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W. 87th Street in Manhattan. Flavin didn't manage to crack Broadway at this time (his Broadway debut would not occur for another thirty-nine years, in the 1971 revival of "The Front Page," in which Flavin played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from star Robert Ryan). He worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours, arriving in Los Angeles around 1932. He quickly made the transition to movies, landing the lead in his very first film, a Universal serial, The Airmail Mystery (1932). He also landed his leading lady, marrying the serial's female star Lucile Browne that same year. However, the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film. Thereafter, he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters, many of them without so much as a name. He specialized in uniformed cops and hard-bitten detectives, but played chauffeurs, cabbies, and even a 16th-century palace guard with aplomb. Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971, and in almost a hundred television episodes before his final appearance, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976). Flavin died of a heart ailment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 1976. His widow Lucile died seventeen days later. They were survived by their son, William James Flavin, subsequently a professor at the United States Army War College. James and Lucile Brown Flavin were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.Read more

Movies & web series

The Daring Young Man

McKenna of the Mounted

The Airmail Mystery

My Girl Tisa

Tough as They Come

Mickey the Kid

Straight from the Heart

The Big Race

Beloved

Hallmark Hall of Fame

The Twilight Zone

New York Town

Law and Order

How to Behave

The Addams Family

Joe Palooka in the Knockout

I Love Lucy

Treat 'Em Rough

Thru Different Eyes

Manhattan Heartbeat

Everybody's Baby

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

The New Breed

The Grapes of Wrath

In Cold Blood

Mildred Pierce

La Conga Nights

Laura

Code of the Streets

The Eddie Cantor Story

City Detective

South Sea Sinner

The Devil's Henchmen

Secret Service Investigator

Mr. Novak

My Man Godfrey

King Kong

It Takes a Thief

Hot Steel

Sergeant Madden

The Roaring Twenties

Born to Be Wild

You Can't Take It with You

Here Come the Marines

Chinatown Squad

The Lucy Show

Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident

The Last Hurrah