James Flavin

American character actor whose career lasted nearly half a century James Wilson Flavin Jr was the son of a hotel waiter of CanadianEnglish extraction and a mother Katherine whose father was an Irish immigrant Thus Flavin wellknown in Hollywood as an Irish type was only onequarter Irish Flavin was born and raised in Portland Maine a fact that may have enrichened his later working relationship with director John Ford also a Portland native He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point but contrary to some sources did not graduate Instead he dropped out and returned to Portland where he drove a taxi Then as now summer stock companies flocked to Maine each year and in 1929 he was asked to fill in for an actor He did well with the part and the company manager offered him 150 per week to go with the troupe back to New York Flavin accepted and by the spring of 1930 was living in a rooming house at 108 W 87th Street in Manhattan Flavin didnt manage to crack Broadway at this time his Broadway debut would not occur for another thirtynine years in the 1971 revival of The Front Page in which Flavin played Murphy and briefly took over the lead role of Walter Burns from star Robert Ryan He worked his way across the country in stock productions and tours arriving in Los Angeles around 1932 He quickly made the transition to movies landing the lead in his very first film a Universal serial The Airmail Mystery 1932 He also landed his leading lady marrying the serials female star Lucile Browne that same year However the serial marked virtually the last time that Flavin would play the lead in a film Thereafter he was restricted almost exclusively to supporting characters many of them without so much as a name He specialized in uniformed cops and hardbitten detectives but played chauffeurs cabbies and even a 16thcentury palace guard with aplomb Flavin appeared in nearly four hundred films between 1932 and 1971 and in almost a hundred television episodes before his final appearance as President Dwight D Eisenhower in Francis Gary Powers The True Story of the U2 Spy Incident 1976 Flavin died of a heart ailment at CedarsSinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on April 23 1976 His widow Lucile died seventeen days later They were survived by their son William James Flavin subsequently a professor at the United States Army War College James and Lucile Brown Flavin were buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City California