James Finlayson

James Finlayson (1887-1953) was a Scottish-born character actor best known as a staple of producer Hal Roach's comedies as a frustrated foil, most often to Laurel and Hardy. Displaying a bald pate and adorned with a false walrus moustache, Finlayson was typecast beginning in the silent days as villains and antagonists, doing eye popping takes and squinting. In the sound era, he added a trademark "D'oooooohhh" (which in truncated form was later used by Homer on The Simpsons).
Finlayson's earliest silent shorts were opposite Ben Turpin and then, at Roach, supporting Snub Pollard several times, Lionel Barrymore once, and frequently teamed as the villain to hero Stan Laurel and more occasionally with Oliver Hardy. As Laurel and Hardy solidified into their official Stan and Ollie characters and starring series, Finlayson continued, playing grasping landlords, scheming bankers or lawyers, and exasperated home owners, employers, shopkeepers, sergeants, and prison wardens, among others. He played the same parts in a handful of Our Gang comedies and other Roach shorts, and supported Laurel and Hardy in features (with his largest role as villainous saloon owner Mickey Finn in 1937's Way Out West).
In his final Laurel and Hardy film Saps at Sea (1940), he played the doctor whose seafaring prescription to Ollie starts the plot. He acted more sporadically afterwards, including a cameo as a silent era comic in The Perils of Pauline (1947), a sheriff in the Roy Rogers Western Grand Canyon Trail, and uncredited bits in Foreign Correspondent, To Be or Not to Be (with Jack Benny), and Royal Wedding (with Fred Astaire). 
==References==
* Paul Dooley, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art guard in Don't Eat the Pictures, plays the part as an impression of James Finlayson (from his takes to his equally false droopy moustache)."10 Things You Didn’t Know About “Don’t Eat the Pictures”" by Jake S. Friedman. Tough Pigs. November 16, 2023.
==Sources==
Category:Movie References