Snub Pollard

Harold Fraser (9 November 1889 – 19 January 1962), known professionally as Snub Pollard, was an Australian-born vaudevillian who became a silent film comedian in Hollywood, popular in the 1920s.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, on 9 November 1889, young Harry Fraser began performing with Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company.

The company ran several highly successful professional children's troupes that traveled Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

[1] By 1915, he was regularly appearing in uncredited roles in movies, for example, Charles Epting notes that Pollard can clearly be seen in Chaplin's 1915 short By the Sea.

The most famous Snub Pollard comedy is 1923's It's a Gift, in which he plays an inventor of many Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, including a car that runs by magnet power.

Motion Picture World reported that Pollard "will continue his two-a-day performances in between the new series of comedies to be produced, in order that his newly gained vaudeville popularity may be made effective for his forthcoming films.

Pollard's first two-reelers for Weiss were solo vehicles, but he was soon teamed with Mack Sennett "fat" comic Marvin Loback as a poor man's version of Laurel and Hardy.

In the wake of the crash, he announced plans for a series of talking comedies to be produced independently, at the Metropolitan Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

[9] The plans fell through and Pollard returned to California, in hopes of landing work in feature films as a character comic.

In Wheeler & Woolsey's Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934), he plays a drunken doctor; at the end of Miracle on 34th Street (1947), when a squad of bailiffs hauling sacks of mail enters the courtroom, Pollard brings up the rear.

Publicity photo
Harold Lloyd ( center ) early in his career with Pollard ( lower left ) and Bebe Daniels