Glen Vernon (born Glenn Vernon; October 27, 1923 – October 27, 1999) was an American actor.
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Early life
Glenn Vernon hailed from Fall River, Massachusetts, and joined his father's song-and-dance vaudeville act at the age of six. The elder Vernon split up the act, studying accountancy while sending Glenn to New York to study acting. Glenn took various odd jobs while in New York: "One of them was hustling film back and forth between a downtown exchange and a newsreel theater on upper Broadway." His first stage job was as a member of the chorus in the George Abbott musical Best Foot Forward. He used his given name of Glenn Vernon until 1950, when he adopted "Glen Vernon" as his professional name.
Career
By 1944 he was established as a Broadway juvenile, and he was recruited by Casey Robinson of RKO Radio Pictures to play a sensitive Russian soldier in the film Days of Glory. Signed to a term contract, Vernon went on to play featured roles in dramas, comedies, and musicals, among them Youth Runs Wild, Step Lively,Those Endearing Young Charms, Bedlam, Riverboat Rhythm, and The Woman on the Beach.
The RKO studio often offered its own version of another studio's popular property. When Universal Pictures had Abbott and Costello, RKO's answer was Brown and Carney. In the musical-comedy field, Universal had Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. RKO teamed its popular young players Glenn Vernon and Marcy McGuire. This pairing resulted in two features, the second being Glenn Vernon's only leading role: a hapless jazz clarinetist who can't read music, in the Hollywood-themed feature Ding Dong Williams (filmed in 1945). The third Vernon-McGuire film was to be the Leon Errol feature Riverboat Rhythm, but McGuire objected to the size of her role. After McGuire angrily petitioned her bosses for her own starring vehicles, RKO released her from the payroll and dissolved the Vernon-McGuire series. RKO waited for almost a year for the public to forget the Vernon-McGuire team, and finally released Ding Dong Williams in the spring of 1946. Vernon recruited his Broadway co-star Joan Newton to replace McGuire in Riverboat Rhythm.
