In life you’ve just gotta take what it gives you.  Some people want to be doctors, some want to be actors.  Some of those people who want to be actors might not be just like everybody else.  Some are taller, some plumper, some more handsome and pretty — we usually only see that kind — and some are smaller.  Billy Curtis was one of the latter.  The 4’2″ Curtis wanted to be an actor, and we’re fortunate he pursued his dream.  The Massachusetts-born (on this date in 1909) Curtis left us with a legacy of over a hundred appearances in movies and TV, and that’s a rich bequest indeed.

It might have been Billy Curtis, career shoe salesman, if not for the encouraging words from actress Shirley Booth, who befriended the young Curtis and persuaded him to try going for a stage career.  Thanks to Miss Booth’s pep talk, as related in biographer Jim Manago’s Love is the Reason for It All: The Shirley Booth Story, Curtis embarked on a career which took him to Broadway in the early 1930s playing children in several plays, standard practice back then and good work if you could get it.  The good-looking small-stature actor made his motion picture debut in the 1938 now-cult classic The Terror of Tiny Town, a musical western played straight, but played entirely by a cast of little people.  Naturally considered a novelty or even a “bad movie” but certainly no less entertaining or thrill-packed than many of the hundreds of low-budget westerns and sagebrush serials produced for the movies, The Terror of Tiny Town cast Billy Curtis in the starring role as the heroic sheriff who ends up getting the girl and saving the day.  Curtis makes a credible white-hat good guy and it was a big role for his first time out. 

So then here’s what happens to a career for an actor like Billy Curtis.  You get another role the next year in a John Wayne western feature called Three Texas Steers, cast as a midget named Hercules.  Maybe not what Curtis might have dreamed of, but it was a real movie for Republic Studios.  Next up for Billy Curtis is the role — or at least the opportunity — of a lifetime.  MGM’s making a feature film version of L. Frank Baum’s magical tale The Wizard of Oz, and they’re looking for a whole lot of little people to play the Munchkins.  Billy is among the most prominent, playing a city father of Munchkinland.  It was a big Hollywood movie, and despite the less-than-knock-’em-dead reception the film achieved the first time out, we all know how the film has gone on to become perhaps the most beloved classic of all time.  It’s remarkable, and with a title like The Wizard of Oz on your resume, your place in pop culture history is assured forever.  You don’t need anything else for that honor, but if you’re a working actor, you’ve got to keep food on the table and your face before the public. 

Unfortunately, roles for little people, no matter how talented, good-looking or agreeable they might be, are limited, even for someone with so much going for him like Billy Curtis.  Not that he wasn’t in some terrific films — you’ll find Frank Capra’s Gary Cooper classic Meet John Doe on his resume, as well as Hitchcock’s Saboteur, and the Betty Hutton musical Incendiary Blonde and so many more — but many times he wasn’t even given onscreen credit.  When he did get it, it often was simply for playing “The Midget”.  Not maybe what he should have been known for, but Billy Curtis was a working actor and he was a plus in every role he played.  Among the other movies you can glimpse him in, but you’ve sometimes got to have really good eyes and a quick finger on the pause button, are so many titles that you’d recognize:  The Lassie movie Hills of Home, Chaplin’s Limelight, the Rosemary Clooney/Bob Hope musical Here Come the Girls, the Martin & Lewis comedy 3 Ring Circus, Danny Kaye’s medieval comedy The Court Jester (he’s somewhere in the scene below), the simian thriller Gorilla at Large, the Gary Cooper Quaker drama Friendly Persuasion, and the list goes on.  He even played small statured silent actor Harry Earles in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney as Chaney, in the movie’s recreation of The Unholy Three. 

Television also kept Billy Curtis busy.  He worked in all genres, and also got another notch on his pop culture belt by appearing in the feature that marked George Reeve’s debut playing Superman.  1951′s Superman and the Mole-Men was later shown as a two-part episode of the TV series, and it was a fine introduction to Reeve’s natural charm playing The Man of Steel.  Curtis was one of the two titular Mole-Men, and he also guest-starred in another Superman episode later in the series’ run.  The Superman appearance is another huge credit for Billy Curtis, keeping his name alive for generations already and with no end in sight.  As long as Superman survives as a beloved character, Superman and the Mole-Men will stand as an important historical milestone.

As we said before, Billy Curtis was a working actor.  He appeared in more movies over the years — Robin and the 7 Hoods, Two on a Guillotime, Angry Red Planet, Dick Van Dyke’s The Comic, Planet of the Apes — sometimes small roles, sometimes not.  He played an prominent role in the Clint Eastwood’s 1973 western High Plains Drifter, and also got a major co-starring role in the gangster spoof Little Cigars, toplined by the sultry Angel Tompkins, for American International.  And more TV than any self-respecting couch potato-babyboomer can shake a remote control at –  I Spy, Ben Casey, Batman, The Monkees, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, Bewitched, Here’s Lucy, Gunsmoke, Bracken’s World, Laverne & Shirley, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, and so it goes. 

Billy Curtis’ other pop culture Hall of Fame appearance was in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, in the superb 2nd season episode “Journey to Babel”, playing one of a pair of ambassadors onboard the Enterprise en route to a peace conference. (A selection of shots from the episode is found below).  This is the segment of the series that introduced Spock’s mother and father, so this is a really big deal.  The Wizard of Oz, Superman and the Mole-Men and Star Trek are impressive enough for any actor’s calling card, and Billy Curtis did them all.  (He also played Mayor McCheese in McDonald’s commercials, yet another pop culture landmark of sorts). 

After a long career full of satisfying work and even more importantly after enjoying a wonderful family life, Billy Curtis passed away on November 8, 1988.  He was always proud of his work and his stature, and we’ve got a wonderful creative legacy to remember him by.  Billy Curtis would have been 101 years old today.  Happy Birthday, Billy!  We still remember you.