Warren Hymer

Warren Hymer
Hymer in Meet the Boyfriend (1938)
Born	Edgar Warren Hymer (1906-02-25)February 25, 1906 New York City, U.S.
Died	March 25, 1948(1948-03-25) (aged 42) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place	Chapel of the Pines Crematory
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1929–1946

Edgar Warren Hymer (February 25, 1906 – March 25, 1948) was an American theatre and film actor.

He was born in New York City. His father, John Bard Hymer (1875/1876 – 1953) was a playwright (with nine Broadway plays to his credit, according to the Internet Broadway Database^[1]), vaudeville writer and actor,^[2] while his mother, Eleanor Kent, was an actress.^[3]

He appeared in 129 films between 1929 and 1946, as well as the 1928 Broadway play The Grey Fox.^[4] Despite his typical screen persona as an unsophisticated tough guy with a Brooklyn accent, he actually attended Yale University.^[2][5] With his burly frame and good-natured grin, he almost always played punch-drunk prizefighters, affable soldiers or sailors, or Runyonesque gangsters. He had only two leading roles: opposite Buster Keaton in Keaton's comeback short subject The Gold Ghost (1934), and as one of a trio of mobsters hired to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943).

In a famous Hollywood anecdote, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn had Hymer removed from the studio after he showed up for work drunk. Hymer responded by breaking into Cohn's office and urinating on his desk.^[3] Cohn ordered the desk to be burned, then tried to blackball Hymer in the film industry.^[3] The incident probably happened in 1939, during the filming of Hymer's last Columbia assignment, The Lady and the Mob. Cohn's warning to other studios to avoid Hymer was effective in the short term -- Hymer had only two assignments in 1940. Cohn's ace director Frank Capra, who had angrily left Cohn's employ, broke the Cohn curse by hiring Hymer for his 1941 feature Meet John Doe. From then on, Warren Hymer was working steadily again. He made up for lost time by accepting more frequent work at smaller studios like Monogram and PRC, between more prestigious assignments at larger studios.

Perhaps Warren Hymer's most unusual role was in the 1941 Monogram feature Phantom Killer. Hymer, in his usual Brooklynesque dumb-bell character, played the slow-witted assistant to police lieutenant Kenneth Harlan. Harlan could not finish the picture due to a brief illness, and the quickie production couldn't wait, so Harlan's character was fatally wounded and Hymer took over as senior officer. Grimly resolving to avenge Harlan's death, and suddenly losing all vestiges of dumbness, Hymer played the rest of the movie straight, in his own, dialect-free voice.

Hymer experienced severe health issues in his last years, slowing his work schedule. Illness forced him to retire from the screen in 1946, and he remained "seriously ill for over a year."^[6] He died in 1948 in Los Angeles, California, the cause of death listed as a stomach ailment.^[7] His remains are interred at Chapel of the Pines Crematory.^[8]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Warren Hymer.

• Warren Hymer at IMDb
• Warren Hymer at the Internet Broadway Database
• Warren Hymer at Find a Grave