Walter Catlett

Biography

Walter Catlett carved out a career for himself playing excitable, officious blowhards, and few actors did it better. A San Francisco native, he started out in vaudeville - with a detour for a while in opera - before breaking into films in the mid-1920s. Two of his best remembered roles were as the stage manager driven to distraction by James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and the local constable who throws the entire cast in jail, and winds up there himself, in the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938). He retired after making Beau James (1957), and died of a stroke in 1960.