Reginald Denny (actor)

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Reginald Denny in his final acting role as Commodore Schmidlapp in Batman: The Movie.

Reginald Denny (birth name Reginald Leigh Dugmore) (November 20, 1891 – June 16, 1967) was an English stage, film, and television actor.

Born in Richmond, Surrey, England, he began his film career in 1915 and made films both in the US and England until the 1960's^[1]. He came from a theatrical family who came to the US in 1912 to appear in the stage production Quaker Girl. His father was the actor and singer W. H. Denny.

Denny was a well known actor in silent films and with the advent of Talkies he became a character actor. He played a lead role in a number of his earlier films, generally as a comedic Englishman, and later had reasonably steady work as a supporting actor in dozens of movies, including a screen version of Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo and the Frank Sinatra "caper" movie Assault on a Queen.^[2]

Later, Denny made frequent appearances in television during the 1950s and 60's. His last role was in Batman: The Movie (1966) as Commodore Schmidlapp.

[edit] Aviation career

Reginald Denny 1917

He served as a pilot in WWI in the Royal Air Force,^[3] and in the 1920s he performed as a stunt pilot. In the early 1930s, Denny became interested in radio controlled model planes. He and his business partners formed Reginald Denny Industries and opened a model plane shop in 1934 known as Reginald Denny Hobby Shops. Denny bought a plane design from Walter Righter in 1938 and began marketing it as the Dennymite.^[4] In 1940, Denny and his partners won an Army contract for their radio controlled target drone, the OQ-2 Radioplane. They manufactured nearly fifteen thousand drones for the army during WWII.

It was at the Van Nuys Radioplane factory that, in 1944, Army photographer David Conover saw a young lady named Norma Jeane, and thought she had potential as a model. This "discovery" led to fame for Jeane, who soon changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.^{[citation needed]}

The company was bought by Northrop in 1952.^[5] The Hobby shop business was closed in the 1960s.