---
name: "Charles Rogers"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/charles-buddy-rogers"
roles: ["Actor"]
born: "13 August 1904"
died: "21 April 1999"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "actor"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T21:23:31.466441+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Charles Rogers

Actor. Born 13 August 1904 in Olathe, Kansas, USA. Died 21 April 1999.

## Details

- **Work:** Actor
- **Born:** 13 August 1904, Olathe, Kansas, USA
- **Died:** 21 April 1999
- **Also known as:** Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, America's Boyfriend , Buddy Rogers, Chas. "Buddy" Rogers
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_%22Buddy%22_Rogers, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2704464, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0736777/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/102500

## Streaming the US now

- **Tubi:** [*Wings*](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md) (78)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Charles Rogers

> Rogers was the boy next door for as long as Hollywood needed one: eager, clean-cut, pleasant to look at and not much more. *Wings* (1927) is the one to see, and even there Clara Bow and Richard Arlen are the ones you watch.

In *Wings* (1927) Jack Powell is building a racing car at home, and the girl next door is in love with him, and he has not noticed. That is Charles Rogers's screen career in one image: a nice boy, busy with something, looked at by someone he is not looking back at. Clara Bow's Mary does everything in that scene. She moves, she sulks, she changes her mind. Rogers grins at the engine.

He had come to Hollywood in 1926 and by his own account was ready to give it up. "I just wanted to say the heck with it and go back to Kansas. Then I had lunch with Billy Wellman and he put me in 'Wings' and there went Kansas." Wellman had flown in the war and wanted his fliers in real aircraft, and Rogers did the work: the aerial scenes are the reason the film still holds, and he is in them. Paramount then sold him as America's Boyfriend and kept him at it through the early 1930s, in *My Best Girl* (1927) opposite Mary Pickford and *Abie's Irish Rose* (1929) opposite Nancy Carroll, with whom he was paired five times. The pictures were about a pleasant young man getting the girl, and he was a pleasant young man, and he got her.

The honest thing to say is that he never did much else. He was open-faced and willing and he could carry a scene without spoiling it, which is a skill, and it is not acting. In *Wings* we kept waiting for him to do something Bow had not already done first, and he never did. Richard Arlen, as the rich boy in the next bunk, gets the same thin material and is quieter and better with it, and Henry B. Walthall and Julia Swayne Gordon, as Arlen's parents seeing their son off, moved us more in a minute than Rogers manages across the whole triangle. Critics at the time said he was agreeable and no more. His answer was to go and lead a band.

The band is the second act. He ran his own dance orchestra and played several instruments on screen, and the studios built pictures around it: *Old Man Rhythm* (1935) and *Dance Band* (1935), the kind of musical comedy in which the plot exists to get the band on stage. Some of these were bad, and nobody has argued otherwise. He kept working in films until 1957 and turned up as a guest on television afterwards.

If you want to see him, see *Wings*, and see it for the air, where Wellman's cameras are inside the aircraft and Rogers is up there in a real cockpit in a real sky. On the ground, look at Bow. The film does.

## Biography

Charles Edward 'Buddy' Rogers (1904–1999) was an American actor and musician. Born in Olathe, Kansas, he studied at the University of Kansas before beginning his professional acting career in Hollywood in the mid-1920s.

Rogers is best known for his leading role as Jack Powell in the 1927 silent film *Wings*, the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he appeared in numerous films and was publicised as 'America's Boyfriend'. He also worked as a bandleader and made later television appearances.

In 1937 he married silent-film star Mary Pickford; the couple remained together until her death in 1979 and adopted two children.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, catalog.afi.com, imdb.com, latimes.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Wings* (1927), Fi1m 78, as Jack Powell — [page](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md)

## Complete filmography (52)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *Clara Bow: Hollywood's Lost Screen Goddess* (2012), Actor
- *The Muppets Go to the Movies* (1981), as Jack Powell (archive footage) (uncredited)
- *The Lucy Show* (1962), series, as Buddy
- *Hot Rod Gang* (1958), Executive Producer
- *The Parson and the Outlaw* (1957), as Jericho Jones
- *Cavalcade of Bands* (1950), series, Actor
- *Riviera Dream* (1950), as Buddy Rogers
- *An Innocent Affair* (1948), as Claude Kimball
- *Sleep, My Love* (1948), Producer
- *Stork Bites Man* (1947), Producer
- *Little Iodine* (1946), Producer
- *Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost* (1942), as Dennis Lindsay
- *12th Street Rag* (1942), Actor
- *Mexican Spitfire at Sea* (1942), as Dennis Lindsay
- *Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 2* (1941), Actor
- *Sing for Your Supper* (1941), as Larry Hays
- *The Mexican Spitfire's Baby* (1941), as Dennis Lindsay
- *Golden Hoofs* (1941), as Dean MacArdle
- *This Way Please* (1937), as Brad Morgan
- *Let's Make a Night of It* (1937), as Jack Kent
- *Once in a Million* (1936), as Pierre
- *Pirate Party on Catalina Isle* (1935), as Buddy Rogers
- *Old Man Rhythm* (1935), as Johnny Roberts
- *Dance Band* (1935), as Buddy Milton
- *Take a Chance* (1933), as Kenneth Raleigh
- *Best of Enemies* (1933), as Jimmie Hartman
- *70,000 Witnesses* (1932), Producer
- *Running Hollywood* (1932), as Buddy Rogers
- *This Reckless Age* (1932), as Bradley Ingals
- *Working Girls* (1931), as Boyd Wheeler
- *The Road to Reno* (1931), as Tom Wood
- *The Lawyer's Secret* (1931), as Laurie Roberts
- *The Stolen Jools* (1931), as 'Buddy' Rogers
- *Along Came Youth* (1930), as Larry Brooks
- *Heads Up* (1930), as Jack Mason
- *Follow Thru* (1930), as Jerry Downes
- *Safety in Numbers* (1930), as William Butler Reynolds
- *Young Eagles* (1930), as Lieutenant Robert Banks
- *Half Way to Heaven* (1929), as Ned Lee
- *Illusion* (1929), as Carlee Thorpe
- *The River of Romance* (1929), as Tom Rumford
- *Close Harmony* (1929), as Al West
- *Red Lips* (1928), as Hugh Carver / Buddy
- *Someone to Love* (1928), as William Shelby
- *Varsity* (1928), as Jimmy Duffy
- *Abie's Irish Rose* (1928), as Abie Levy
- *Get Your Man* (1927), as Robert Albin
- *My Best Girl* (1927), as Joe Grant
- *Wings* (1927), as Jack Powell — Fi1m 78, [page](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md)
- *So's Your Old Man* (1926), as Kenneth Murchison
- *More Pay - Less Work* (1926), as Willia Hinchfield
- *Fascinating Youth* (1926), as Teddy Ward

## Gallery

- ![Charles Rogers](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-e57ebe6f4044.jpg) Charles Rogers — Eugene Robert Richee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Charles_Buddy_Rogers_by_Richee.jpg/1280px-Charles_Buddy_Rogers_by_Richee.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Radio Guide, Week Ending August 25, 1934](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-64316dff7559.jpg) Radio Guide, Week Ending August 25, 1934 — Radio Guide, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Charles_Buddy_Rogers.jpg/1280px-Charles_Buddy_Rogers.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Eugene Robert Richee (1930)](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-fc870e745e35.jpg) Eugene Robert Richee (1930) — Richee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Buddy_Rogers_-_The_New_Movie_Aug._1930.jpg/1280px-Buddy_Rogers_-_The_New_Movie_Aug._1930.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Cropped screenshot of Charles "Buddy" Rogers from the film Wings (1927)](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-401a7d2dca8f.jpg) Cropped screenshot of Charles "Buddy" Rogers from the film Wings (1927) — Trailer screenshot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Buddy_Rogers_in_Wings_trailer.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Charles Rogers](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-ec4af9551567.jpg) Charles Rogers — Image via TMDB
- ![Charles Rogers](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-c9775aa1316f.jpg) Charles Rogers — Image via TMDB
- ![Buddy Rogers](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-a1bfc8143f1b.jpg) Buddy Rogers — credited as "Army Air Forces photo", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Buddy_Rogers_-_USAAF.jpg/1280px-Buddy_Rogers_-_USAAF.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Charles "Buddy" Rogers, film actor Subjects (LCTGM): actors (1928)](https://film.one/media/person/1224062/gallery-4f61af7548d1.jpg) Charles "Buddy" Rogers, film actor Subjects (LCTGM): actors (1928) — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Charles_%22Buddy%22_Rogers%2C_film_actor_%28SAYRE_8795%29.jpg/1280px-Charles_%22Buddy%22_Rogers%2C_film_actor_%28SAYRE_8795%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)

## Awards

### Other awards — 1 won

- Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award 1986: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (won)

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/charles-buddy-rogers