Louis Wolheim (March 28, 1880 - February 18, 1931) was an American character actor.
His trademark broken nose was the result of an injury sustained while playing football for Cornell University. Despite his rugged visage, Wolheim was intelligent and cultivated, speaking French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish. He was also a mathematics teacher before entering silent films in 1914. On the advice of Lionel Barrymore, Wolheim entered films. He appeared...
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Louis Wolheim (March 28, 1880 - February 18, 1931) was an American character actor.
His trademark broken nose was the result of an injury sustained while playing football for Cornell University. Despite his rugged visage, Wolheim was intelligent and cultivated, speaking French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish. He was also a mathematics teacher before entering silent films in 1914. On the advice of Lionel Barrymore, Wolheim entered films. He appeared in at least two films with Lionel's brother, John Barrymore, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1920) and Tempest (1928). Wolheim's visage almost immediately typecast him in roles as gangsters, executioners (as in D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm) or prisoners. Towards the end of the 1920s he occasionally broke out of these stereotypes and played a comic Russian officer in Tempest and a rambunctious Sergeant in Howard Hughes's Two Arabian Knights.
Wolheim acted primarily in silent films, due to the fact that he died at the close of the silent era, but...
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