Max Wagner

Max Wagner
Born	4 November 1901 Torreon, Coahuila Mexico
Died	16 November 1975 (aged 73) Hollywood, California U.S.
Occupation	actor
Years active	1924–1975

Max Wagner (28 November 1901–16 November 1975) was a Mexican-born American film actor who specialized in playing small parts such as thugs, gangsters, sailors, henchmen, bodyguards, cab drivers and moving men, appearing in over 300 films in his career, most without receiving screen credit. Newspaper gossip columnists noted his rise from playing "Gangster #4", with no lines, and not carrying a gun, to "Gangster #2", with both lines and a gun.^[1][2]

Biography

Wagner was one of five children, all boys, of William Wallace Wagner, a railroad conductor, and Edith Wagner, a writer who provided dispatches for the Christian Science Monitor during the Mexican Revolution. When he was 10 years old, his father was killed by rebels and the family moved to Salinas, California, where he met John Steinbeck, who became a life-long friend. Steinback based the character of the boy in his novel The Red Pony on Wagner.

Three of Wagner's brothers were working in Hollywood – Jack and Blake as camermen for D.W. Griffith, Hal Roach and Mack Sennett, and Bob as an assistant cameraman at First National – and Max Wagner moved there in 1924, where he got an acting job on the Harry Langdon film his brother Jack was working on, All Night Long.

Under the name "Max Baron", Wagner acted in many Spanish-language versions of English-language films, which studios made as a matter of course in the early days of sound films, He also served as a Spanish coach for other actors, and appeared in many of the "Mexican Spitfire" films starring Lupe Velez, where he also served to monitor Velez's Spanish ad-libs for profanity. Other series that Wagner appeared in include the Charlie Chan films, and Tom Mix serials, as well as others made by Mascot Pictures Corporation. In the 1940s, Wagner was part of Preston Sturges' unofficial "stock company" of character actors, appearing in six films written and directed by Sturges, beginning with The Palm Beach Story^[3]

Wagner's career has several breaks in it. He served with the U.S. Army in the North African Campaign of World War II, and his struggle with alcoholism caused a break in 1950.

In 1952, Wagner began to appear on television, in episodes of such shows as The Cisco Kid, Zane Grey Theater and Perry Mason, playing much the same kind of parts he played in the movies.

Notable roles for Wagner include "Sgt. Rinaldi" in the cult science fiction classic Invaders from Mars 1953,^[1] an actor playing a gangster in the film-within-a-film segment of Bullets or Ballots 1936, and the bull farm attendant in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945).^[2]

Wagner died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1975, just 12 days before his 74th birthday.^[1]

Notes

External links

• Max Wagner at the Internet Movie Database
• Max Wagner at Allmovie
• Max Wagner at the TCM Movie Database