Robert Woolsey

Robert Rolla Woolsey was an American stage and screen comedian and half of the 1930s comedy team Wheeler & Woolsey.

He was born in Oakland, California.[1] Woolsey always had a slight build, and as a young adult he tried to capitalize on it by becoming a jockey. After he fell from a horse and sustained an injury, he quit racing and turned instead to the stage. In 1925 he was featured as "Mortimer Pottle" in W. C. Fields's Broadway hit Poppy.

Woolsey was teamed with comedy star Bert Wheeler in 1928, for the Broadway musical Rio Rita. RKO Radio Pictures filmed the play in 1929, launching Wheeler and Woolsey as movie personalities. Of the twenty-two films Woolsey would make, twenty-one of them would be with his comedy partner, Wheeler.

Woolsey became terminally ill in 1937 and struggled to finish his last picture, High Flyers. He was then confined to bed for almost a full year, before dying of kidney failure in 1938.[2] Robert Woolsey was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.