Walter Andrew Brennan

 Walter Andrew Brennan (July 25, 1894 – September 21, 1974)

He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1936, 1938, and 1940, making him one of only three male actors to win three Academy Awards. Brennan began taking parts as an extra in films in 1925 and then bit parts in as many films as he could, including Texas Cyclone and Two Fisted Law with another newcomer to Hollywood, John Wayne. Brennan also had bit parts in The Invisible Man (1933), Girl Missing (1933), the Three Stooges short Woman Haters (1934), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which he had a brief speaking part and also worked as a stuntman. In the 1930s, he began appearing in higher-quality films and received more substantial roles as his talent was recognized. This culminated with his receiving the first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Swan Bostrom in the period film Come and Get It (1936). Two years later, he portrayed town drunk and accused murderer Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Throughout his career, Brennan was frequently called upon to play characters considerably older than he was. The loss of many teeth in a 1932 accident, rapidly thinning hair, thin build, and unusual vocal intonations all made him seem older than he really was. He used these features to great effect. In many of his film roles, Brennan wore dentures; in Northwest Passage – a film set in the late 18th century – he wore a dental prosthesis which made him appear to have rotting and broken teeth. Brennan played the top-billed lead in Swamp Water (1941), the first American film by the director Jean Renoir, a drama also featuring Walter Huston and starring Dana Andrews. From 1957 to 1963, he starred in the ABC television series The Real McCoys, a sitcom about a poor West Virginia family that relocated to a farm in Southern California. Brennan died of emphysema at the age of 80 in Oxnard, California. He is interred at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, CA.