Frank Faylen

Was in two Oscar Best Picture winners: Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Lost Weekend (1945), and eight other Best Picture nominees: The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941), Sergeant York (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Wake Island (1942), It's A Wonderful Life (1946) and Funny Girl (1968).

Played a taxi driver in Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story (1942) and in Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946).

American character actor who specialized in average-guy parts and who could be equally effective in sympathetic or unlikeable roles. His parents, the vaudeville team of Ruf and Cusik, took him onstage with them when he was a baby, and Faylen grew up in the theatre. He attended St. Joseph's Preparatory College in Kirkwood, Missouri, but returned to vaudeville as a comic pantomimist. He toured the country throughout the late Twenties and early Thirties as a clown and later as song-and-dance man with acrobatic agility. During a tour stop in Los Angeles, he was screen tested and began a thirty-year career as one of Hollywood's most familiar character players. His most famous film roles were as the vicious male nurse Bim in The Lost Weekend (1945) and as the cabdriver Ernie in It's A Wonderful Life (1946). But his greatest fame came in television, particularly as Dobie's dad Herbert T.

Wore a white wig playing "Whitey," the hired gun killed by Alan Ladd in Whispering Smith (1948).

Gillis in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). Faylen was married to actress Carol Hughes, with whom he had two daughters.