William Demarest

Carl William Demarest was born on February 27, 1892, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the youngest of three sons of Wilhelmina (née Lindgren) and Samuel Demarest. During his infancy, the family relocated to New Bridge, a hamlet in Bergen County, New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I before embarking on a career in entertainment.

Demarest entered show business through vaudeville, first performing alongside his two older brothers and later as part of a double act with his first wife, Estelle Collette, born Esther Zichlin, under the billing "Demarest and Colette." After roughly two decades in vaudeville, he transitioned to Broadway, where he appeared in productions between 1920 and 1931. His Broadway credits include the revue Silks and Satins, the musical White Lilacs, Earl Carroll's Vanities in 1925, and Earl Carroll's Sketch Book in 1935. By 1926 he had also begun working in film, pursuing stage and screen work concurrently.

His film career spanned from 1926 through the late 1970s and encompassed more than 140 pictures. By the 1940s, Demarest had become a fixture in the informal company of character actors that director Preston Sturges assembled for his screwball comedies. He appeared in ten films written by Sturges, eight of them directed by Sturges, taking prominent roles in The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. His association with Paramount Pictures grew so familiar that his name alone was invoked in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard as a potential star for William Holden's unsold baseball screenplay. In 1951 he appeared in The Strip opposite Mickey Rooney, playing a nightclub owner and pianist whose band included Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Earl "Fatha" Hines. His performance as Al Jolson's fictional mentor in The Jolson Story (1946) earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He also shared the screen with the real Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

On television, Demarest played the recurring character Jeb Gaine, an occasional sidekick to the lead, during the 1961–62 season of the Western series Tales of Wells Fargo. In 1963 he appeared as Police Chief Aloysius of the Santa Rosita Police Department in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and in 1964 he co-starred in the Twilight Zone episode "What's in the Box," portraying a hen-pecked husband who murders his wife, played by Joan Blondell. Blondell and Demarest later reunited on an episode of My Three Sons. His most prominent television role came when he joined My Three Sons in 1965, replacing William Frawley, who was in failing health, as Uncle Charley O'Casey. He held the role for 215 episodes through 1972. His prior personal friendship with series star Fred MacMurray extended back through several film collaborations, including Hands Across the Table (1935), Pardon My Past (1945), On Our Merry Way (1948), and The Far Horizons (1955). His work on My Three Sons earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Role for the 1968–69 season.

Demarest was married twice. His first marriage was to his vaudeville partner Estelle Collette, and he helped raise her daughter, author Phyllis Gordon Demarest, from Collette's earlier marriage to English poet and novelist Samuel Gordon. His second wife was Lucille Thayer, born Lucille Theurer, whom he married on August 31, 1942, in Prescott, Arizona. Thayer later became an activist on health issues in the motion picture industry and was appointed California's lay-chairman of the American Nurses Association in October 1960.

On August 8, 1979, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce bestowed upon Demarest a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to motion pictures. His My Three Sons co-stars Fred MacMurray and his wife June Haver, Tina Cole, Stanley Livingston, Barry Livingston, and Dawn Lyn attended the ceremony and subsequent celebrations at Musso & Frank Grill. In 1998, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars was dedicated to him. Demarest died at his home in Palm Springs, California, on December 28, 1983. His remains are interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.