Charles King was a vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 and Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 actor

Actor

An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...

 who also starred in several movies. He starred as the leading actor in the hit MGM movie, The Broadway Melody

The Broadway Melody

The Broadway Melody is a 1929 American musical film and the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It was one of the first musicals to feature a Technicolor sequence, which sparked the trend of color being used in a flurry of musicals that would hit the screens in 1929-1930...

(1929), the first all-talking film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture

Academy Award for Best Picture

The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...

.

Early Life

Charles J. King was born in New York City on October 31, 1886 to Thomas and Ellen King, both of whom were born in Ireland and had immigrated to the U.S. in 1883. Eleven children would be born to them, but only three were living by 1900: Charles, Nellie and Mary . Under the name of Mollie King, Mary would eventually pursue a film career between 1916 and 1924.

Theatrical Career

By 1908, King had begun acting on the Broadway stage; his first known role came in the revue The Mimic World. In the 1910s his most frequent partner was Elizabeth Brice with whom he appeared in The Slim Princess, A Winsome Widow, Watch Your Step and Miss 1917

Miss 1917

Miss 1917 is a musical revue with a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, music by Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern and others, and lyrics by Harry B. Smith, Otto Harbach, Henry Blossom and others...

. King continued to appear in many major Broadway successes during the 1920s, including George White's Scandals (1921 edition), Little Nellie Kelly, Keep Kool, Hit the Deck and Present Arms, before turning his attention to Hollywood and the nascent genre of film musicals.

Recordings

Between January 1911 and April 1930 Charles King made a series of commercial recordings for Victor, Columbia and Brunswick including several of his stage and film hits. A total of 26 recordings were issued, 12 of them duets with Elizabeth Brice.

Film Career

In late 1928, like many of his musical theatre colleagues, Charles King journeyed to Hollywood to begin appearing in films. His feature-film debut, The Broadway Melody, was an immense hit for MGM in 1929 and featured him singing the title song and "You Were Meant for Me", two significant song hits the same year. King introduced such other hits as "Orange Blossom Time" in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) and "Happy Days Are Here Again

Happy Days Are Here Again

"Happy Days Are Here Again" is a song copyrighted in 1929 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and published by EMI Robbins Catalog, Inc./Advanced Music Corp...

" in Chasing Rainbows (1930), but could not sustain the initial momentum of his film popularity as musicals oversaturated the market, many failed at the box office and studios ended their contracts with musical performers. By the end of 1930, he had returned to the Broadway stage where he would spend the remainder of his career.

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