- Born
- Died
- Birth nameEugene Oliver Edgar Stutenroth
- Height6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
- Tall (6'2"), burly, and reliable character actor Gene Roth was born Eugene Oliver Edgar Stutenroth on January 8, 1903 in Redfield, South Dakota. He was the youngest of three sons born to German father Eugene Stutenroth and Swedish mother Anna Christina Olsen. Roth and his two brothers were raised by their mother after their father abandoned them when Gene was only two years old. Gene graduated from West High School in Minneapolis in 1920. He began his acting career doing uncredited bit roles in silent pictures in the early 1920's. Moreover, Roth worked as a movie theater manager and built and installed pipe organs before his acting career took off in the 1940's following his arrival in Hollywood, California in 1943.
Often cast as threatening heavies (he's perhaps best known for his portrayals of bad guys in many 1940's comedy shorts he did with The Three Stooges), scruffy working class types, and rough-around-the-edges law officers (he played initially skeptical small town sheriffs in the 1950's creature feature classics Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) and The Spider (1958)), Gene worked profusely in both films and television alike in a career that spanned a little over two decades. After retiring from acting in the early 1970's, Roth worked part time as a liquor counterman at a drug store and was an active participant in the nostalgia convention circuit. He was married four times and was the father of three children. Gene's life came to a tragic untimely end at age 73 when he was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the street in Los Angeles, California on July 19, 1976.- IMDb Mini Biography By: woodyanders
- SpousesDorothy Biddle(1934 - 1963) (divorced, 1 child)Helen Mack(1927 - 1934) (divorced, 1 child)Velda Parsons(1924 - 1925) (divorced, 1 child)
- Resembled Lee J. Cobb
- Almost died after contracting pernicious anemia in 1963. Fortunately Roth managed to pull through, but lost a lot of weight in the process and acquired a very gaunt look as a direct result of this.
- Was the father of three children: son Eugene Arthur and daughters Rosemarie and Dorene.
- His father was a professional gambler and his mother was a dressmaker.
- Had a small part in The Cure (1974), which would have been his last role, but it was cut from the episode before broadcast.
- From 1920 to the early 1940s he was in the exhibition area of show business, managing vaudeville theaters and, later, movie theaters all over the US. He specialized in installing pipe organs in theaters, and while in Hollywood in the early 1940s to do just that, he was spotted by a casting director who thought he looked the way a Nazi SS officer was supposed to look (although he was actually Swedish, not German) and talked him into doing a small part in a picture, which gave him his start in acting.
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