Highly rare vintage 8x10-inch sepia-tone portrait, boldly signed in black fountain pen, with an inscription in slightly lighter ink. In good condition for its age, with minor edge wear. Master comic actor Edgar Kennedy entered films in 1914, playing innumerable supporting roles, more often than not mustache-twirling villains, in Mack Sennett silent comedies. By the next decade, his screen image mellowed, so that he was increasingly cast as detectives and middle-aged husbands. He joined Hal Roach Studios in 1928, where he developed the persona for which he is best remembered, that of the hotheaded, exasperated "average Joe" who is gradually heated up into his trademark "slow burn". He was unforgettable opposite Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chase, and Our Gang, and in one of Roach's most enduring comedies, A Pair of Tights (1928). During the talkie era, he was memorable in classic films like the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), San Francisco (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Anchors Aweigh (1944), Harold Lloyd's Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). Kennedy died of throat cancer at the age of 58.

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