Career
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Truex started acting at age five and toured through Missouri at age nine as "The Child Wonder in Scenes from Shakespeare". His Broadway debut came in 1908 and he performed in several David Belasco plays and portrayed the titled role in the 1915 musical Very Good Eddie.
He made his film debut in 1913, but did not work in film full time for another twenty years. He tended to play "milquetoast" characters and in The Warrior's Husband he played a "nance". In the 1939 The Adventures of Marco Polo, he played Marco Polo's comical assistant, opposite Gary Cooper.
Early in television, Truex guest starred on CBS's Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town. From 1953 to 1954, he co-starred with a young Brandon deWilde in Jamie on ABC. He played aging Grandpa McHummer striking a bond with young Jamie, his recently orphaned grandson.
He also starred in the first season (1958 – 1959) of CBS's The Ann Sothern Show as Jason Macauley, the manager of the swank Bartley House hotel in New York City. Reta Shaw played his wife, Flora. In 1960, Truex appeared with Harpo Marx in the episode "Silent Panic" of CBS's anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson.
In later life, he became known for playing elderly men on television in works such as Justice, Mr. Peepers, and had the main role in the "Kick the Can" episode of Rod Serling's original The Twilight Zone (With his son Barry). In another Twilight Zone episode, "What You Need", he played a traveling peddler who just happened to have exactly what people needed just before they knew they needed it.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)