James Flavin

James William Flavin Jr. was born on May 14, 1906, in Portland, Maine, the son of a hotel waiter of Canadian-English descent and a mother named Katherine, whose own father had emigrated from Ireland. Flavin attended West Point and played football there but did not complete his studies. His path into acting began in 1929, when summer stock companies visiting Maine asked him to fill in for an absent actor. His performance impressed the company manager enough to earn him an offer of $150 per week to travel with the troupe to New York. By spring of 1930, Flavin was living in a rooming house at 108 West 87th Street in Manhattan.

He spent the early 1930s working his way through stock productions and touring companies across the country, eventually reaching Los Angeles around 1932. The transition to film came quickly. His first screen role, in the Universal serial The Airmail Mystery (1932), was also the lead, a distinction that would not be repeated. That same year he married his costar in the film, Lucile Browne. For the remainder of his screen career, Flavin worked almost entirely in supporting parts, accumulating nearly four hundred film appearances between 1932 and 1971. He became closely associated with uniformed authority figures — police officers, detectives, sheriffs — though his roles also included chauffeurs, cab drivers, and a 16th-century palace guard.

Television added another dimension to Flavin's career. He appeared in close to one hundred television episodes across multiple series. He played Detective Sawyer in several episodes of The Burns and Allen Show, appeared three times as a sheriff on Sky King, and had a recurring role as Robert Howard in 33 episodes of the ABC/Warner Brothers drama series The Roaring 20s, which aired from 1960 to 1962 and starred Dorothy Provine, Donald May, Rex Reason, John Dehner, Gary Vinson, and Mike Road. He also appeared in three episodes of the CBS sitcom Pete and Gladys with Harry Morgan and Cara Williams, and held a recurring role as Mr. Kramer, the stable owner, on CBS's Mister Ed. Among his other television credits were the NBC sitcom The People's Choice starring Jackie Cooper, the 1958 Richard Diamond, Private Detective episode "The Ed Church Case" on CBS in which he played Sam Cooper, a 1959 guest appearance as Big Dan Girod on Bourbon Street Beat, and a 1960 appearance in The Twilight Zone episode "A Passage for Trumpet." He portrayed Fire Chief Hawkins in the 1964 Mr. Novak episode "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" on NBC. His final screen appearance came in Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident (1976), in which he played U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Flavin made his Broadway debut late in his career, appearing in the 1969 revival of The Front Page. In that production he played Murphy and also briefly assumed the lead role of Walter Burns, a part otherwise performed by Robert Ryan.

Flavin died on April 23, 1976, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles following a heart attack. His widow, Lucile Browne Flavin, died seventeen days later. Both are interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.