Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,794
By This is the grave of Donald Meek.
Born in 1878 in Glasgow, Scotland, Meek spent the first part of his growing up there before the family came to Canada in the early 1890s. He was a tiny boy and got into performing, specifically as an acrobat. He joined a team of acrobats in the early 1890s and did the most dangerous bits. The troupe actually toured the U.S. but then he fell during a bit and broke his leg so that was about it for his acrobat career.
During the Spanish-American War, Meek joined up, part of the 6th Pennsylvania Regiment. I guess there weren’t size requirements to join the military at the time. Like a lot of soldiers, came down with yellow fever. It was this experience that led Walter Reed to discover why the heck yellow fever happened to begin with. Meek survived his yellow fever and was lucky to do so. However, it cost him all his hair.
By 1900, Meek and the rest of his family were in Philadelphia. He was working as a dry goods salesman. But Meek’s interest in performing continued and he started getting work on Broadway. One of his first plays was The Minister’s Daughters, from 1903. But it wasn’t until the mid 10s that he was really a standout on the stage and a go-to guy, often in supporting roles, but also often in leading plays. He also took some time off during World War I, going back to Canada and joining the Canadian Highlanders, but he never saw action in Europe, which frustrated him. But also in these years, he toured everywhere. He was part of a troupe that did a global tour of the British Empire, meaning he worked in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and other colonies. He saw a lot more of the world than almost anyone else of the time. He got really into this whole colonial thing too. For his whole life, his favorite author was Kipling.
In the late 20s, Hollywood came calling for this now aging but highly respected actor. Obviously you weren’t going to cast Meek as a lead. He was no Gary Cooper! But in key supporting roles? There was no one better for a particular kind of role–an old worried guy, maybe a banker or a lawyer. In the 30s, Meek became the HEY IT’S THAT GUY of Hollywood. Seriously, look at this face. If you watch a lot of 30s films, which is I do, it’s definitely there with the 50s and 70s for me as the most watched film decades of the 20th century (at least for Hollywood films), you are like HEY! I KNOW THAT GUY!
Right?
Meek worked constantly and of course a lot of the movies were bad, as was often the case in an era when Hollywood put out product at a prodigious pace. But by the late 30s, the best directors in Hollywood were casting him in top roles. So when I think of Meek, I think of his work with John Ford in two movies. The first was Stagecoach, where he played the whiskey salesman, and the second was Young Mr. Lincoln, where he played the prosecutor. Ford used him several times for some of his most respected movies of the 30s (these tend not to be the most watched of his films today), such as 1935’s The Informer, nominated for Best Picture. In fact, he was in two of the films nominated for Best Picture that year, the other being Michael Curtiz’s Captain Blood, with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. Frank Capra brought him in for You Can’t Take It With You, from 1938, where he certainly wasn’t the top star in that huge cast that included Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore, but his face was on the poster.
There were so many other movies too, of various level of remembrance. They included My Little Chickadee, the 1940 film that was a vehicle for Mae West and W.C. Fields; Norman Taurog’s 1934 film Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, another Fields film; Jacques Tourneur’s 1939 detective film Nick Carter, Master Detective, where Meek played a quiet beekeeper who also served as the hero’s assistant, etc. He was in The Whole Town’s Talking, from 1935, Jesse James, from 1939, The Return of Frank James, from 1940, State Fair, from 1945, etc.
When Meek died, the New York Times summed up his career well:
“Several generations of play and movie-goers came to know Donald Meek, a slight, bald, quavering-voiced actor as the entertainment world’s representative of Mr. Average Man. On stage and screen he was usually covered with confusion, a man burdened down by feelings of timidity and ineffectuality.
A mere glimpse of Mr. Meek was generally calculated to arose audiences to loud laughter. To them he was, by virtue of his name and deportment, truly one of the meek of the world.”
But as the Times pointed out after this description and as you know this far into the post, Meek was far from colorless and had lived quite a life! Along with everything else, he was a pretty good amateur boxer and he had a personal hobby of criminology.
Meek came down with leukemia in the mid 40s. He worked until the end. In his short 18 year career, he acted in over 100 films. He was filming his last movie, Magic Town, directed by William Wellman and starring James Stewart and Jane Wyman, when he died in 1946. He was 68 years old.
Donald Meek is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. I think it’s because that’s where his wife was from.
If you would like this series to visit other people who acted in Stagecoach, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Wayne is in Corona del Mar, California and Thomas Mitchell is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.