Person Biography:
Eugene Oliver Edgar Stutenroth, known professionally as Gene Roth, was born on January 8, 1903, in Redfield, South Dakota. He was the youngest of three sons born to Eugene Stutenroth, a German father, and Anna Christina Olsen, a Swedish mother.
After his father abandoned the family when Gene was just two years old, his mother raised him and his two brothers. Gene graduated from West High School in Minneapolis in 1920 and began his acting career in the early 1920s, initially doing uncredited roles in silent pictures.
Roth's career took off in the 1940s after he arrived in Hollywood, California in 1943. He often played threatening heavies, scruffy working-class types, and rough-around-the-edges law officers, making him a familiar face in many 1940s comedy shorts with The Three Stooges.
Gene worked prolifically in both films and television, spanning a career that lasted over two decades. After retiring from acting in the early 1970s, Roth worked part-time as a liquor counterman at a drug store and participated in the nostalgia convention circuit.
Gene was married four times and had three children. His life came to a tragic and untimely end on July 19, 1976, at the age of 73, when he was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the street in Los Angeles, California.
