Frank Jenks

About Frank Jenks

Who is it?: Actor, Soundtrack
Birth Day: November 04, 1902
Birth Place:  Des Moines, Iowa, United States
Died On: May 13, 1962(1962-05-13) (aged 59)\nLos Angeles, California, U.S.
Birth Sign: Sagittarius
Years active: 1933–1962

Frank Jenks Net Worth

Frank Jenks was born on November 04, 1902 in  Des Moines, Iowa, United States, is Actor, Soundtrack. Wavy-haired American character actor and musician Frank Jenks was the son of advertising man Frank Jenks and pianist Lillian Sadler. After his family settled in Los Angeles, he attended the University of Southern California. He learned to play trumpet, trombone and clarinet, but eventually dropped out of college and embarked on leading a band on the West Coast vaudeville circuit. He then took the next step and became a song-and-dance man. From being a hoofer, he made his way to the legitimate stage and from there to movies, at first playing orchestra leaders. While this required little acting ability, he soon came into his own as a comic actor, his cinematic stock-in-trade being fast talking reporters (his caustic delivery was used to best effect in His Girl Friday (1940)), droll Runyonesque henchmen, cabbies, grifters, cops, bartenders and drunks. His improvisational acumen in adding his own routines to varied comedy scripts led to his receiving Hollywood's sobriquet as "off-the-cuff Jenks".Amid numerous supporting parts, often for Universal's B-team, Jenks finagled the odd star billing, notably in a series of forgotten potboilers made by Poverty Row outfit PRC during the 1940's. From the early 1950's, he was a regular guest performer on television, appearing in just about anything, from Adventures of Superman (1952) to Perry Mason (1957).
Frank Jenks is a member of Actor

💰 Net worth: Under Review

Some Frank Jenks images

Biography/Timeline

1920

Jenks began in vaudeville and went on to a long career in movies and television, mostly in comedy. He was one of the more familiar faces and voices of the Hollywood Studio era. For almost ten years beginning in the early 1920s, Jenks was a song and dance man in vaudeville.

1933

In 1933, when sound films had become the norm, and Broadway actors were moving to Hollywood in droves, Jenks's flat, sarcastic delivery landed him a film career. Internet Movie Data Base lists him appearing in 180 titles over the next 28 years (including TV) often as a sarcastic cabbie, reporter, cop or soldier. Usually a supporting actor, Jenks did appear occasionally as a film lead for low-budget films for PRC. Jenks appeared in not a few classics. In the Cary Grant- Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday (1940), Jenks had his most famous role, as the cynical newsman "Wilson." When television began, Jenks made a successful transition.

1951

Jenks portrayed Lieutenant Rodney in the DuMont series Front Page Detective (1951-1952), and he was a member of the cast of The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theater, which was syndicated in 1955.

1953

Jenks' biggest continuing role was that of Uthas P. Garvey, the skeptical, proletarian right-hand man for the loquacious English conman Colonel Humphrey Flack (1953-1954), in the DuMont TV series of that name. He reprised the role in a syndicated version of Colonel Humphrey Flack that was syndicated in 1958.