Charles B. Middleton
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Charles B. Middleton (October 3, 1874 - April 22, 1949) was an American stage and film actor.
Born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Charles Middleton worked in a traveling circus, in vaudeville, and acted in live theatre before he turned to motion pictures in 1920.
A character actor, Middleton initially got his first breaks when he appeared in some of the Hal Roach Studios' Laurel and Hardy films. He then was cast in Warner Bros. 1932 hit: The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, opposite Ann Dvorak and Richard Cromwell. Other notable performances by Middleton during this period were both released the very next year from Paramount Studios: first as "the district attorney" in This Day and Age, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and then as "the prosecutor" opposite The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. He also played Sheriff Ike Vallon, the official who tries to arrest Julie La Verne (Helen Morgan) and her husband for being illegally married, in Universal Pictures' classic 1936 screen version of the musical Show Boat. In 1940, Middleton played Abraham Lincoln's father in the film version of Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Today, Charles Middleton is most famous for his villainous role as Ming the Merciless, the evil nemesis of Buster Crabbe in the three Flash Gordon serials: Flash Gordon (1936), Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), and 1940's Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. The first of these Flash Gordon serials has the honor of having been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
It is believed that the producer Harry Saltzman of the James Bond films mixed the Ian Fleming real life book character and Middleton's Emperor Ming attributes to create the screen persona for Bond's arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
During a film career that began at age forty-six and lasted almost thirty years, Charles Middleton appeared in nearly two hundred films as well as numerous plays including in the 1946 Broadway production, "January Thaw."
Charles Middleton died of a heart attack in Los Angeles and was interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California next to his wife of many years, stage and film actress Leora Spellman (1888-1945).
