Monty Woolley

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Monty Woolley (August 17, 1888 - May 6, 1963) was an American actor. Born Edgar Montillion Woolley in New York City, Woolley was a professor and lecturer at Yale University (one of his students was Thornton Wilder) who began acting on Broadway in 1936.

He was typecast as the wasp-tongued, supercilious sophisticate. His most famous role is that of the cranky radio wag forced to stay immobile because of a seemingly-injured hip in 1942's The Man Who Came to Dinner, which he had performed onstage before taking it to Hollywood. In the film, he caricatured Alexander Woollcott, a radio and press celebrity of the 1930s and 1940s. He was also a frequent radio presence as a guest performer on such shows as The Fred Allen Show, Duffy's Tavern, The Big Show, and others.

He was an intimate friend of Cole Porter while a student at Yale and in later years. They enjoyed many amusing disreputable adventures together in New York and on foreign travels. He played himself in Warner Bros..' pseudo-biopic about Cole Porter's life, "Night and Day" (1946), a highly fictionalized account of Porter's very unorthodox professional and personal life.

According to Bennett Cerf in Try and Stop Me, Woolley was at a dinner party and suddenly belched. A woman sitting nearby glared at him; he glared back and said, "What did you expect--chimes?" Cerf said that Woolley liked the line so much he insisted that it be added to the script of his next stage role.