Frank Jenks

Who was Frank Jenks?

Frank Jenks was an acid-voiced American supporting actor of stage and films.

Jenks began in vaudeville and went on to a long career in movies and television, mostly in comedy. He was one of the more familiar faces and voices of the Hollywood Studio era. For almost ten years beginning in the early 1920s, Jenks was a song and dance man in vaudeville.

In 1933, when sound films had become the norm, and Broadway actors were moving to Hollywood in droves, Jenks's flat, sarcastic delivery landed him a film career. Internet Movie Data Base lists him appearing in 180 titles over the next 28 years often as a sarcastic cabbie, reporter, cop or soldier. Usually a supporting actor, Jenks did appear occasionally as a film lead for low-budget films for PRC. Jenks appeared in not a few classics. In the Cary Grant- Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday, Jenks had his most famous role, as the cynical newsman "Wilson." When television began, Jenks made a successful transition.

His biggest continuing role was as the skeptical, proletarian right-hand man for the loquacious English conman Colonel Humphrey Flack, in the DuMont TV series of that name.