Bobby Watson

Bobby Watson was an American actor whose stage and screen career stretched from vaudeville to character roles, and later to repeated portrayals of Adolf Hitler. Born in Springfield, Illinois, he began at fifteen in vaudeville at the Olympic Theatre and toured the Midwest with a medicine show before appearing in a Gus Edwards show on Coney Island. He made his Broadway debut in 1918 as a replacement in Going Up, then created the role of Madame Lucy in the 1919 musical Irene and worked on Broadway through the 1920s. Starting in 1925, he played varied film parts, including officers, detectives, and comic dressmakers. Modern viewers know him as the diction coach in Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Fred Astaire's butler in The Band Wagon (1953). From 1942 he was typecast as Hitler, playing the dictator in nine films, such as The Devil with Hitler (1942) and The Hitler Gang (1944). He also wrote and performed on radio.