Jed Prouty

Jed Prouty, born Clarence Gordon Prouty on April 6, 1879, in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American performer whose career spanned vaudeville, Broadway, silent film, talking pictures, and early television. He died on May 10, 1956.

Prouty began his professional life as a vaudeville performer before transitioning to the stage and screen. His Broadway career extended from 1910 to 1947 and included appearances in a range of productions. He starred in The All-Star Idlers of 1921 and took roles in Heads or Tails, the comedy Too Hot for Maneuvers, and the play And Be My Love, among others.

His work in silent films included supporting parts in the Colleen Moore vehicles Ella Cinders (1926) and Orchids and Ermine (1927). When sound arrived, Prouty secured a prominent comic role in The Broadway Melody (1929), one of the earliest and most commercially successful sound musicals, playing a stammering vaudeville booker. The performance helped establish him in talking pictures.

A role in the independently produced Bachelor of Arts (1934), distributed by Fox, led to a studio contract. At Fox, he appeared alongside Will Rogers in Life Begins at 40 (1934) and took the lead in the domestic comedy Every Saturday Night (1936). That film launched the Jones Family series, a run of seventeen low-budget family comedies produced between 1936 and 1940, in which Prouty played the patriarch opposite Spring Byington as Mrs. Jones. Directors on the series included Malcolm St. Clair and Frank R. Strayer. His portrayal of the chief of the Keystone Cops in Fox's Technicolor production Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) earned him favorable notices, but subsequent contract disputes with the studio resulted in his character being written out of the final Jones Family installment, On Their Own (1940), through the plot device of a nervous breakdown. Prouty also appeared in short-subject comedies for RKO Radio Pictures in 1938 and 1939.

Among his other notable film appearances were the role of theater manager in Laurel and Hardy's Hollywood Party (1934), a publicist in A Star is Born (1937), and a network-radio executive in Pot o' Gold (1941), starring James Stewart. Prouty continued working in character roles in film through 1950 and in television through 1952.