Otis Harlan

The American actor and comedian Otis Harlan began on the nineteenth-century stage before moving into Hollywood films. He was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and was educated at Kenyon College, Yale and the Gambier Military Academy before his stage debut in 1887 at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in The Hole in the Ground. He appeared in Victor Herbert's The Magic Knight in 1893, and in 1911 he took the lead in Little Boy Blue, a Broadway production; he also worked in vaudeville and Irving Berlin's ragtime musicals. On screen he took the part of Cap'n Andy in the 1929 part-talkie Show Boat and played Starveling in Max Reinhardt's 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) he supplied the voice of Happy, a member of the Seven Dwarfs; no performer born earlier had appeared in a Disney film. He retired during the summer of 1939 and died in 1940.