Selmer Jackson

Biography

Selmer Adolf Jackson (Lake Mills, Iowa, 1888 – Burbank, California, 1971) was an American actor who spent four decades working as a character player in film and television. He was a dependable supporting presence, a familiar face in studio productions of the 1930s and 1940s.

Jackson learned the basics of acting in amateur work with stock companies such as the Des Moines Stock Company. His screen debut came in the silent film The Supreme Passion (1921), and he adapted to sound pictures without difficulty. Through the 1930s he accumulated a very large number of roles, many of them uncredited, playing lawyers, judges, reporters, radio announcers and officials. These parts made him a recognizable face in Hollywood, though he seldom held the spotlight. His work ranged from screwball comedies to adventure serials.

Sources credit him with nearly 400 films between 1921 and 1963, and he also worked in television. He died of a heart attack in Burbank in 1971, at the age of 82. Today his name matters mainly to those who study the supporting casts of classic Hollywood, where his steady, understated work was a constant presence.

Key films

• Dirigible (1931): a supporting role as a lieutenant in Frank Capra's aviation drama.
• Doctor X (1932): appears as a newspaper editor in one of the early horror films shot in Technicolor.
• The Great Ziegfeld (1936): a brief uncredited appearance as a barbershop customer in the Robert Z. Leonard musical biography.
• Libeled Lady (1936): plays the editor of the Washington Chronicle in this newspaper comedy starring Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow.