Born 1908 as Earl Stanley Morner in Prentice, Wisconsin, American actor and singer Dennis Morgan began his career as a radio announcer in Milwaukee and went on to broadcast Green Bay Packers football games. He became a radio singer in Chicago.
Morgan used the acting pseudonym Richard Stanley before adopting the name under which he gained his greatest fame. According to one obituary, he was “a twinkly-eyed handsome charmer with a shy smile and a pleasant tenor voice in carefree and inconsequential Warner Bros musicals of the forties, accompanied by Jack Carson.” Another said, “for all his undoubted star potential, Morgan was perhaps cast once too often as the likeable, clean-cut, easy-going but essentially uncharismatic young man who typically loses his girl to someone more sexually magnetic.” David Shipman said he “was comfortable, good-looking, well-mannered: the antithesis of the gritty Bogart.”
In 1983, Dennis Morgan, along with his film pal, Jack Carson, who had died in 1963, were inducted into the Wisconsin Performing Artists Hall of Fame. That year he was critically injured in a car crash. He died in 1994 of respiratory failure.
Take a look at these vintage photos to see portraits of a young and handsome Dennis Morgan in the 1930s and 1940s.
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