Keenan Wynn Movies and Career Information

Keenan Wynn (July 27, 1916 – October 14, 1986) was an American character actor and member of a well-known show business family. His bristling mustache and expressive face were his stock in trade, and though he very rarely had a lead role, he got prominent billing in most of his many movie and TV parts. He was born in New York City, New York as Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn, the son of Jewish American vaudeville comedian Ed Wynn, and his Irish-American Catholic wife, the former Hilda Keenan, but took his stage name from his maternal grandfather, Frank Keenan, one of the first Broadway actors to star in Hollywood. Keenan Wynn became an actor with Ed Wynn's encouragement and the two appeared together in the original Playhouse 90 television production of Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight. The son was returning the favour: according to radio historian Elizabeth McLeod, it was Keenan who had helped his father overcome professional collapse and a harrowing divorce and nervous breakdown to return to work a decade earlier, and who now helped convince Serling and producer Martin Manulis that the elder Wynn should play the wistful trainer. as well as a subsequent TV