Charles Meredith

Charles Meredith (August 27, 1894 – November 28, 1964) was an American stage, film, and television actor, who also directed plays and taught in college drama departments. His screen career came in two widely separated phases: as a leading man for silent films in the early 1920s, and as a character actor for films and television from 1947 through 1964. He was a series regular on television shows Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and The Court of Last Resort. Early life Charles Howard Meredith was born in Knoxville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the second of four children for Benjamin Franklin Meredith, a school teacher, and his wife Rosabel Fleming, a daughter of English immigrants. As a child he attended Belleville School in Oakland, Pittsburgh through the eighth grade, then Pittsburgh High School where he ran track and graduated from the academic curriculum during June 1912. College and early stage career Meredith attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he was a student in the Drama department for the School of Applied Design. At the start of his first year he was in a professional production of Salvation Nell at the Pitt Theater in Pittsburgh, his first known stage credit. While at Carnegie, Meredith was active in performing student productions. He also acted as assistant to the department head in staging both college plays and outside special events. According to his 1964 obituary notice in The New York Times and to columnist Kaspar Monahan in The Pittsburgh Press, Meredith earned an M.A. degree at Carnegie. After college, Meredith joined the road company for the Washington Square Players (WSP), performing its repertory of one-act plays alongside Sam Jaffe and Ralph Roeder. He then had a major role in a two-act play, Plots and Playwrights, staged by the WSP at the Comedy Theatre, which also featured Katharine Cornell and Helen Westley. Meredith returned to Pittsburgh for a play in October 1917, but went back to New York in early 1918 for a series of short-lived Broadway productions. First up was the debut of "an odd new comedy" called April by Hubert Osborne, followed by Her Honor, the Mayor, and in June 1918, The Best Sellers, which amused Heywood Broun in his review. Meredith's final Broadway play for seven years came in August 1918, with Allegiance.