Douglas Fowley

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Movie and television actor Douglas Fowley (May 30, 1911-May 21, 1998) was born in The Bronx, New York, USA. The 5'11" actor is probably best remembered by movie buffs for his role as a movie director Roscoe Dexter in Singing in the Rain (1952). The actor appeared in over 240 films and later and dozens of television programs. Fowley's films include Twenty Mule Team (1940), Mighty Joe Young (1949), Battleground (1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), The Naked Jungle (1954), The High and the Mighty (1954) and Walking Tall (1973). Fowley began acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. After nightclub performing and stage work, Fowley appeared in his first film alongside Spencer Tracy in The Mad Game, in 1933. Early in his acting career he was usually cast as movie heavies or gangsters in B-movies including Charlie Chan and Laurel and Hardy features. Fowley, with then-wife contract actress Shelby Payne, is the father of 1960s record producer Kim Fowley. The World War II vet grew a long beard in the 1960s to play Gabby Hayes-like roles on television which was a contrast to his well groomed looks in the 40s and 50s.

Fowley was usually typecast as a villain; when not playing an actual criminal, he often portrayed an argumentative trouble-maker. Portraying a member of Tyrone Power's orchestra in Alexander's Ragtime Band, in the early scenes of the film Fowley's character quarrels with his bandmates, but this is not developed in the film's later scenes.

In the early 1960s, Fowley was a regular cast member in Pistols 'n' Petticoats, a sitcom parodying the old west; Fowley played the elderly patriarch in a family of gun-toting women who needed no male assistance. Fowley continued to act into the 1970s, but increasingly often was billed as "Douglas V. Fowley".