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, The Charlie McCarthy Show, and others.

He was an intimate friend of Cole Porter when Porter was a student at Yale and in later years. They enjoyed many amusing disreputable adventures together in New York and on foreign travels.^[1] 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 his own impromptu line so much he insisted that it be added to the script of his next stage role.

Like Clifton Webb (another larger-than-life personality), Woolley signed with 20th Century Fox in the 1940s and appeared in many films through the mid-1950s. Coincidentally living up to his surname, Woolley sported thick facial hair.

Woolley has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.