Granville Bates (January 7, 1882 – July 8, 1940) was an American character actor and bit player, appearing in over ninety films.

He grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago on the southeast corner of Evanston (now Broadway) Ave. and Oakdale Ave.[2] in a townhouse that his father later demolished, along with all of the others on the block, to redevelop as a four-story commercial building with apartments above.

He appeared on Broadway in the late 1920s and early 1930s, notably in the original production of Merrily We Roll Along (1934) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

He received favorable notice for his character roles, such as in My Favorite Wife (1940), where he played an irascible judge – The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote "Mr. Bates deserves a separate mention for his masterpiece of comic creation.

"[7] Another New York Times reviewer noted that "Edward Ellis and Granville Bates provoked an early audience yesterday to gentle laughter in a brief but quietly amusing sequence" in Chatterbox (1936),[8] while Crowther praised his work in Men Against the Sky (1940): "The players' performances are stock and pedestrian, excepting that of Granville Bates as a cynical banker".