Morgan Conway was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 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...

, best known for his portrayals of Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy is a comic strip featuring Dick Tracy, a hard-hitting, fast-shooting and intelligent police detective. Created by Chester Gould, the strip made its debut on October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror. It was distributed by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate...

.

Early life and career

Born Sydney Conway, he was educated at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. He arrived in Hollywood just in time to get on the ground floor of the industry's burgeoning labor movement. Conway was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild

Screen Actors Guild

The Screen Actors Guild is an American labor union representing over 200,000 film and television principal performers and background performers worldwide...

. His first film appearance was in the 1934 film Looking for Trouble.

For many years he freelanced, working for various studios in bits or supporting roles. His most familiar appearance from this period is probably in Charlie Chan in Reno (1939).

RKO Radio Pictures and portrayal of Dick Tracy

By the mid-1940s he was a contract player for RKO Radio Pictures, and he was chosen to portray Chester Gould's comic-strip detective Dick Tracy in a pair of feature films: Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy (1945 film)

Dick Tracy is a 1945 film based on the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould. It is the first feature film adaptation of the comic strip, and the first part of a quadrilogy...

and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball

Dick Tracy vs. Cueball

Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is a 1946 film starring Morgan Conway as Dick Tracy. It is the second part of the Dick Tracy quadrilogy.-Plot summary:...

. RKO's earliest publicity photos posed Conway in profile, hoping to emulate Gould's square-jawed caricatures. Although this screen Tracy didn't resemble the print Tracy physically, Conway's dramatic interpretation was faithful; he gave the role an understated, businesslike quality totally in keeping with a police procedural. Morgan Conway is considered by many (including Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...

) to be the best screen Dick Tracy.

Conway's films were successful in theaters, but exhibitors had grown accustomed to the screen's original Dick Tracy, actor Ralph Byrd

Ralph Byrd

Ralph Byrd was an American actor. He was most famous for playing the comic strip character Dick Tracy on screen, in serials, movies and television.-Early life and career:...

. Byrd had played the role in four hit serials, and was a closer match physically to the comic character. Some exhibitors petitioned RKO to make more Tracy features, but with Byrd. RKO made the substitution, reassigning Conway to two other "B" features. The studio abandoned most of its "B" product in 1947 and Conway's contract was not renewed.

Later life

Morgan/Sydney Conway left the motion picture industry and returned to New Jersey, where he died of lung cancer at the age of 78, having dabbled in real estate on and off for some years. He was survived by his second wife, Lilian—the couple had been happily married for several decades. Back in the late 1920s, Syd had been briefly married to a young divorcee of some means from Alabama, Aurelia Fitzpatrick Carr, who bore and raised his only child, a son, Ben Conway (1927–2003). Syd and son (and later Ben's wife and children) shared quality time in the late 1940s and early 1950s after Ben returned to New York from his military service in post-war Japan. From the early 1960s to early 1990s, Ben was a prominent literary agent in Hollywood, helping launch a number of writing and directing careers in the same industry in which his father had worked.

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