Edward Everett Horton

It seemed like American actor Edward Everett Horton (1886-1970) appeared in just about every Hollywood comedy made in the 1930s. He was always the perfect counterpart to the great gentlemen and protagonists of the films. Horton specialised in the fretful, woebegone 'Nervous Nellie' types.

British Real Photograph postcard by Sarony, no. 74. Photo: Warner Bros. Caption: No. 40 of a second Series of 42 CINEMA STARS issued with Sarony Cigarettes.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 745. Photo: United Artists / Columbia.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 745a. Photo: Universal.

The drama club that changed the direction of his life

Edward Everett Horton Jr. was born in 1886 in Brooklyn, New York City, to Isabella S. (Diack) and Edward Everett Horton, a print typesetter for the New York Times. He was the eldest of four children; George, Winter Davis, and Hannahbelle were his siblings. The family remained close throughout their lives. Edward's mother lived with him until she died at the age of 101. His brothers and sister also spent their later years residing at his Encino estate.

Edward was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio. However, he was asked to leave after he climbed to the top of a building and, after a crowd gathered, threw off a dummy, making them think he had jumped. He then studied business at both Polytechnic Institute and Columbia.

At Columbia, however, he joined the university's drama club and that changed the direction of his life. He quickly decided on an acting career rather and he left Columbia before graduating. In 1907, he joined the Dempsey Company, a stock company on Staten Island. There he performed in several Gilbert and Sullivan light operas, including 'The Mikado'. His rich baritone singing voice enabled him to appear in chorus on Broadway and he joined the prestigious Louis Mann company, playing in stock and learning his new trade.

He went on to join several theatre companies in the 1910s, including the Orpheum Players in Philadelphia, The Baker Stock Company in Oregon, and the Crescent Theatre in Brooklyn. In the 1920s he acted in and managed the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles with his brother and business manager, George. He made his film debut in the comedy Too Much Business (Jess Robbins, 1922). In only his fourth film, Horton struck gold as a screen comedy performer with his starring role as the butler in the Western comedy Ruggles of Red Gap (James Cruze, 1923) opposite Ernest Torrence. Charles Laughton would play Ruggles in the 1935 version.

Horton portrayed the lead role of an idealistic young classical composer in the drama Beggar on Horseback (James Cruze, 1925) with Esther Ralston. Unlike many of his silent-film colleagues, the stage-trained Horton had no problems in adapting to the sound, despite - or perhaps because of - his quavering, slightly effeminate voice. He appeared in such early talkies as the horror film The Terror (Roy Del Ruth, 1928) with May McAvoy and Louise Fazenda, and Sonny Boy (Archie Mayo, 1929) with child star Davey Lee and Betty Bronson.


British postcard in the Film Shots series by Film Weekly. Photo: Paramount. Edward Everett Horton, Baby LeRoy and Maurice Chevalier in A Bedtime Story (Norman Taurog, 1933).


British card. Photo: Paramount. Maurice Chevalier and Edward Everett Horton in The Way to Love (Norman Taurog, 1933).

Cultivating his own special variation of the double-take

Edward Everett Horton played the role of Professor Nick Potter in Holiday (Edward H. Griffith, 1930) and again in the remake, Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. He also made an impact playing The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland (Norman Z. McLeod, 1933). Other classics in which he played character roles are The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931) with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) again with Astaire and Rogers, and Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941).

Horton cultivated his own special variation of the double-take (an actor's reaction to something, followed by a delayed, more extreme reaction). In Horton's version, he smiled ingratiatingly and nodded in agreement with what just happened; then, when realisation set in, his facial features collapsed entirely into a sober, troubled mask. From 1932 to 1938 he worked often with Ernst Lubitsch such as on Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932), Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933), and The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, 1934) starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Later he worked with Frank Capra on Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937) as the erratic paleontologist, Alexander P. Lovett, and Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944).

During the 1950s, Horton embraced the new medium of television with enthusiasm. His television career started in 1949 in the drama The Man Who Came to Dinner and he appeared regularly on the small screen for the next 20 years in programs such as I Love Lucy (1952), The Red Skelton Hour (1957-1962), Dennis the Menace (1962-1963), Burke's Law (1963-1965), and Batman (1966). He gained a new fanbase as the storyteller in the animated series Fractured Fairy Tales (1959-1962). He was also the befuddled Hekawi medicine man Roaring Chicken on the Western comedy series F Troop (1965). His later feature films include Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961) starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, the highly successful It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963) with Spencer Tracy, and Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964), starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood.

His last film role was in the comedy Cold Turkey (Norman Lear, 1971), in which his character sat in a wheelchair and communicated only through facial expressions. Horton died before the film was released. During his long career, he appeared in more than 120 films and never tied himself down with a long-term contract to any single studio. He remained a freelancer throughout his long career. In the theatre, he appeared in several revivals of the comedy play 'Springtime for Henry' beginning in the 1930s and extending into the 1960s. He played the part of the effete Henry Dewlip more than 3,000 times.

At the age of 84, Edward Everett Horton died of cancer in 1970 in Encino, Los Angeles. He is interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, CA. According to an in-depth article by Eve Golden in Classic Images magazine, Edward's longtime companion was actor Gavin Gordon, who was 15 years his junior. Not much was ever documented about the couple. They had appeared together in a 1931 production of Noël Coward's 'Private Lives' and acted in one film together, Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961). Edward Everett Horton has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6427 Hollywood Boulevard for his contribution to the motion picture industry.


Italian postcard in the '100 Artisti del Cinema' series by Edizione ELAH 'La Casa delle caramelle', no. 29. Photo: Warner Bros. Edward Everett Horton in It's Love I'm After (Archie Mayo, 1937). The Italian film title was Avventura a mezzanotte.


American Arcade card.

Sources: Chris Whiteley (Hollywood's Golden Age), Volker Boehm (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

The Edward Everett Horton DVD project

At Kickstarter, Ben Model started a project to release 8 Silent Comedy Shorts with Edward Everett Horton on DVD. All shorts were made in 1927-1928 and unreleased for decades. So, pledge money to help bring this project to life. Check it out.

This post was last updated on 23 February 2024.