For Tuesday’s Today in Ginny, ginnyfan is thankful that there is absolutely no connection between Virginia Weidler and Charlie Sheen.

First up, orchestrator R.H. Bassett (1873) did his thing for the Warner Baxter-Leila Hyams film SURRENDER (1931). Virginia had one of her “girl” roles in that one. Bassett worked on many of the early talkies, such as THE BIG TRAIL. He was done in Hollywood by 1939 and one of his last films was SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES. He was also probably responsible for whatever the Weidler Brothers played in DIMPLES.  A photo of the SURRENDER stars fills in for Bassett.

Robert Middlemass (1883) had a solid career playing authority figures. Police captains, military officers, committeemen; in one film his character was actually listed as John E. Stevens, the Boss. He was the Police Commissioner in LOVE IS A HEADACHE (1938), the first Ginny-Mickey teamup. He followed that up with the role of Charlie-the camp owner, another leader of sorts, in GOLD RUSH MAISIE (1940).

Silent film star and sound picture character actor Pat O'Malley (1890) is virtually unknown today. That’s not surprising when you consider the passing of time, but in his case the anonymity was hastened by the existence of a very popular character actor with a similar name, J. Pat O'Malley, who worked steadily from the advent of the television era into the 1980s. Our Pat O'Malley played a purser in TROUBLE FOR TWO (1936), the Robert Mongomery-Rosalind Russell film that featured Ginny in its trailer, but not in the film. Our Pat has cast listings as early as 1908, but it appears his career actually got going in 1915. In 1925, he was the leading man in King Vidor’s PROUD FLESH, which starred Vidor’s future wife Eleanor Boardman and also featured a silent actor named Harrison Ford (no one remembers him, either.) He maintained high billing, for the most part, in the early 1930s, but by the time of T4T all his roles were unbilled. Nevertheless, he continued to work into the 1960s, more than doubling the output of that “O'Malley come lately.”