Ben Bard

Ben Bard was a baritone singer, comedian, and actor who moved between musical theater, vaudeville, and films. Born in Milwaukee, he began performing in the early 1910s as a singer in musicals and vaudeville. In 1921 he joined the tour of The Whirl of New York as straight man to the comedian Jack Pearl, and the two formed a double act that reached Broadway in The Dancing Girl (1923) and Topics of 1923. From 1926 to 1946 he worked as a film actor, first as a leading man in Fox silents including 7th Heaven (1927), then in sound films such as The Bat Whispers (1930), The Seventh Victim (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), and Black Angel (1946). In the 1930s he founded the Ben Bard Dramatic School, where he taught until 1969, and he later headed Twentieth-Century-Fox's New Talent Department and worked as a dialogue director for MGM.