Charles Wagenheim, a diminutive character actor, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1896, to immigrant parents. Initially drawn to an acting career to counterbalance his acute shyness, Wagenheim's career comprised hundreds of minor but atmospheric parts onstage, film, and TV.
After touring with a Shakespearean company, he appeared in a host of Broadway plays, including "A Holy Terror" (1925),"Four Walls" (1927),and "Ringside" (1928). Following a stage part in "Schoolhouse on the Lot" (1938),Wagenheim turned to Hollywood for work.
His dark, grave-like manner, baggy-eyed scowl, and lowlife countenance proved ideal for a number of genres, particularly crime thrillers and westerns. In films from 1929, Wagenheim scored well when Alfred Hitchcock chose him to play the assassin in "Foreign Correspondent" (1940).
Wagenheim went on to enact a number of seedy, unappetizing roles (tramps, drunks, thieves) over the years but never found the one juicy part that could have put him at the top of the character ranks. Usually billed tenth or lower, Wagenheim was more filler than anything else, which his blue-collar gallery of cabbies, waiters, deputies, clerks, morgue attendants, junkmen, etc., will attest.
Some of his better delineated roles came with "Two Girls on Broadway" (1940); "Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum" (1940); "Halfway to Shanghai" (1942); the cliffhangers "Don Winslow of the Navy" (1942) and "Raiders of Ghost City" (1944); "The House on 92nd Street" (1945); "A Lady Without Passport" (1950); "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef" (1953); and "Canyon Crossroads" (1955).
One of his more promising roles came as "The Runt" in "Meet Boston Blackie" (1941),which started Chester Morris off in the popular 1940s "B" series as the thief-cum-crimefighter, but the sidekick role was subsequently taken over by George E. Stone.
Of his latter films, it might be noted that Wagenheim was cast in the very small but pivotal role of the thief who breaks into the storefront in which the Frank family is hiding above in "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959).
