Roscoe Karns

Roscoe Karns was born on September 7, 1891, in San Bernardino, California, and went on to become a prolific American actor whose career spanned five decades across stage, film, and television. He died on February 6, 1970, at St. Vincent's Hospital in Los Angeles, where he had been admitted the previous December. He married Mary M. Frasco in 1920, and the couple had two children, Mary Karns Hart and Roscoe Todd Karns, Jr.

Karns began his performing career with a San Diego stock company while still in high school, and he would later note that he never earned income outside of show business at any point in his life. He accumulated nearly 150 film appearances between 1915 and 1964, establishing himself as a specialist in cynical, wisecracking characters whose rapid-fire delivery became a recognizable asset in comedies and crime thrillers throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He appeared in silent films including Wings and Beggars of Life before sound cinema allowed his particular talents fuller expression.

Among his most prominent film roles was the intrusive bus passenger Oscar Shapeley in the 1934 Oscar-winning comedy It Happened One Night, in which he attempts to pursue Claudette Colbert. That same period brought another notable performance as the hard-drinking press agent Owen O'Malley in Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century. Karns later returned to the Hawks orbit as one of the reporters in His Girl Friday in 1940, and his final film credit was Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport? in 1964. In 1937, Paramount paired him with Lynne Overman in two B comedy-mystery pictures, Murder Goes to College and Partners in Crime, casting the two as laconic private detectives.

In 1944, Karns brought his talents to Broadway, appearing in the play School for Brides. As film opportunities became harder to secure in the late 1940s, he pivoted to the emerging medium of television through a contact at the DuMont Television Network, relocating to New York City for the work. From 1950 to 1954, he played the title role in the DuMont series Rocky King, Inside Detective, a popular program in which his son, character actor Todd Karns, also appeared. Between 1959 and 1962, Karns was cast as Captain, and later Admiral, Walter Shafer in seventy-three of the ninety-five episodes of the CBS series Hennesey, which starred Jackie Cooper as a United States Navy physician and Abby Dalton as nurse Martha Hale.