Charles Ogle — Was It Luck — Do You Think? (1924) 🇺🇸

The quality about Charles Ogle that draws around him old and young alike on the studio lot, is his kindliness of manner. The sympathy of heart that shone so unforgetably through his interpretation of the old doorman in “After the Show,” which marked the turning point of his screen career, is a genuine attribute.

After many years on the stage, Ogle came into the movies in the days of their crude beginnings, played a year or two on all the lots, doing all sorts of rôles, and in 1909 signed his first contract. Since that date, except for brief vacations of but a few days’ duration, he has been idle only one month!

A mine of reminiscence, Charles Ogle. Absorbed, the studio folks listen, as he weaves glamorous pictures of the past.

“I played with the three Pickford kids — but they were called Smith in those days — when they started on the stage. Carried Jack on for his first rôle — his salary was twenty-five cents a week. Used to hold Mary and Lottie [Jack Pickford | Mary Pickford | Lottie Pickford] on my knees, with Jack climbing all over me begging for gumdrops, Why, I put Jack’s first pair of pants on him, when he graduated to boyhood.

“I toured in a company with the Kimballs when Clara, now Clara Kimball Young, was just a tiny tot. An inquisitive mite, that one, and wily. Used to bother us something awful, when we menfolks would sit smoking, and we’d say, ‘Run along, honey, it isn’t nice for little girls to stay in the room where men are talking and smoking cigars.’ And we’d have to bribe her with candy.”

Several hundred rôles he has played, few of them particularly conspicuous ones. But he has made money; he has invested wisely. “Lucky, just plumb lucky, that’s all,” he drawls in his soft voice. At nineteen, in order to obtain the money to gratify his mother’s ambition that he study law. he went on the stage, doing everything from musical comedy to playing a tuba in a circus. Having at last completed his legal education he settled down to practice law and dallied a bit with politics. Uneventful years passed. Then, the old love of acting forever stirring him to restlessness, he returned to the boards, playing for twenty years in all the sure-fire “mellerdrammers” of the day. Then he drifted into pictures. “That was the luckiest thing I ever did,” he says.

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Photo by: Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924