Hero of the Month: Russell Hicks
When you needed someone to play a good solid citizen, like a judge or banker, filmmakers knew to look no further than Russell Hicks. Much to his family’s disappointment, Hicks threw away a business career for the theater, where he would ironically play businessmen.
Acting in stock companies and eventually on Broadway in the twenties, Hicks came to Hollywood in the mid-thirties, where he quickly cut a niche for himself as a character actor, the dignified solid citizen. He appeared in The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), Little Miss Broadway (1938) and was Porthos in The Ritz Brother’s version of The Three Musketeers (1939). A break from his usual role came in The Bank Dick (1940) where Hicks played a con man who snookers W. C. Fields, uttering the classic line “I want to be honest with you in the worst way”.
The forties saw Hicks starting to appear in serials, usually as a high ranking police officer or city official, who never left his office, much less got out from behind his desk. His serial work included Junior G-Men (1940), King of the Mounties (1942), Captain America (1944) and The Master Key (1945). Feature films during this time included The Strawberry Blonde (1941), The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949).
As with any successful character actor, when the fifties came so did work in television. Hicks would appear on The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, The Phil Silvers Show, Cheyenne, and Crossroads, where he had a recuring role as Judge Irving.
