IMDb calls him Charles. Wikipedia calls him Charlie. I think an entire generation calls him “the grandfather from The Parent Trap.” At least one. Actually, it turns out that I haven’t seen nearly as much of his work as I thought I had, but he had a long career—you almost wish he’d done one more movie, to get the round hundred—and actually has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one each for movies, TV, and radio. I don’t much care about the Hollywood Walk of Fame; I don’t think having a star proves anything. But still, serious contribution to three fields!

Of course, his career also goes back so far that he’s one of those people who could not possibly have grown up wanting to be a movie star, because when he was a boy, there was no such thing. In fact, he was a bare month younger than Florence Lawrence, referred to as “the first movie star.” He trained as a doctor, but the lure of acting was too strong. His stage career started in 1905, his first Broadway show was in 1914, and his first film was in 1915. His first talkie was in 1929.

It tells you something about the early days of film that there can be someone whose first love was stage and still made nearly a hundred movies. And unlike a lot of other people with lengthy credits, nothing is listed as a short. They’re listed separately. There are five of them. And one is the classic “Ben and Me,” in which he voiced Ben Franklin. It also doesn’t count TV, where I will probably always know him best as the voice of Aesop on the “Aesop and Son” segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

It seems strange to me that there are people who got to know him before he was old. He’s always been old, right? I mean, he was already almost thirty when he made his first movie, and that was a hundred years ago. By the time talking pictures came around, he was middle aged. Younger than I am now, but still. By the time my mom was growing up, he was pretty much old. Besides, there’s something about him that just seems like someone’s grandfather. Even when his character has no children, such as in Follow Me, Boys!

I don’t know much about him as a person; it is a sad truth of IMDb and Wikipedia as resources that you don’t really get to know most older figures as people. There is nothing here about possible charity giving. No mention of children. Wikipedia says that his first marriage ended in divorce, and although his second one is listed in the sidebar, it says nothing about it at all. So for all I know, he was a terrible person who hated kids and kicked kittens. But I wouldn’t know, because he is a kindly old man who loves his separated-as-babies granddaughters and smells of tobacco and peppermint.