---
name: "Fred Stone"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/fred-stone"
roles: ["Actor"]
born: "18 August 1873"
died: "6 March 1959"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "actor"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T22:49:49.022763+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."
---

# Fred Stone

Actor. Born 18 August 1873 in Longmont, Colorado, USA. Died 6 March 1959.

## Details

- **Work:** Actor
- **Born:** 18 August 1873, Longmont, Colorado, USA
- **Died:** 6 March 1959
- **Also known as:** Fred Andrew Stone
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Stone, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q373738, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0831872/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/77176

## Fi1m on Fred Stone

> A Broadway acrobat and clown who came to sound films in his sixties and played tired, decent fathers. In *Alice Adams* (1935) he is better than the leading man, and most of what made him famous never reached a camera.

Fred Stone's Virgil Adams sits at the family table in *Alice Adams* (1935) and lets his wife talk. Ann Shoemaker's Mrs Adams wants more for their daughter, and Virgil is a tired, decent man who would rather not want anything, nagged into ambition he does not feel. Stone plays him as somebody who lost the argument years ago and has stopped expecting to win it. Fred MacMurray, the young man Katharine Hepburn is performing for, is pleasant and a little blank; Stone gives the better performance, and the family rows he is caught in are the truest scenes in the film.

He arrived at that table by an odd road. Stone began in circuses and minstrel shows in the 1880s, formed a vaudeville and Broadway partnership with Dave Montgomery in the 1890s that ran until Montgomery's death in 1917, and created the Scarecrow in the original stage production of *The Wizard of Oz* in 1902. He was an acrobatic dancer, a singer and a comedian long before he was anything a film would call an actor, and he stayed on Broadway, on his own, into the mid-1940s. Films were the sideline. There were silent comedy westerns from 1918, then nothing much until the sound era, when he came back in his sixties in supporting parts from 1935 and stopped in the early 1940s. About nineteen features in all, most of them small.

What the camera got was the residue. In the sound years he was cast as ordinary, put-upon fathers and older men: Judd Tolliver in *The Trail of the Lonesome Pine* (1936), an early Technicolor western, and Caliphet Mathews in *The Westerner* (1940), third-billed under Gary Cooper. Reviewers at the time noticed that he could carry humour and pathos in the same body, in a kitchen or a small town, and that is exactly what Virgil is: a man who is faintly funny in his exhaustion and then, a line later, not funny at all. We felt more for him than for anyone else in the film, Hepburn included, and it is because Stone never asks for it. He does not plead. He looks worn, and Shoemaker keeps talking, and the scene does the rest.

The frustration is that the films are the least of him. Nearly everything his contemporaries praised, the tumbling, the singing, the eccentric comedy of *Jack o' Lantern* (1917) and *Stepping Stones* (1923), happened on stages and is gone. Watch *Alice Adams* for Hepburn, then watch the man at the end of the table, and know that you are seeing the quiet end of a career that was mostly loud.

## Biography

Fred Andrew Stone was an American stage and film actor. He began performing in circuses and minstrel shows, then formed a long-running vaudeville partnership with David Montgomery. The pair starred together on Broadway in productions including the 1903 extravaganza *The Wizard of Oz*, in which Stone played the Scarecrow.

Stone made his feature-film debut in 1918 and appeared in around 19 films. He played Virgil Adams in *Alice Adams* (1935) and Caliphet Mathews in *The Westerner* (1940). He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Alice Adams* (1935), Fi1m 79, as Virgil Adams — [page](https://film.one/film/alice-adams.md)

## Complete filmography (20)

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

- *The Dickie Henderson Show* (1960), series, Actor
- *The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll* (1960), as Cabinet Minister (uncredited)
- *The Westerner* (1940), as Caliphet Mathews
- *No Place to Go* (1939), as Andrew L. Plummer
- *Konga, the Wild Stallion* (1939), as Yance Calhoun
- *Quick Money* (1937), as Mayor Jonas Tompkins
- *Life Begins in College* (1937), as Coach Tim O'Hara
- *Hideaway* (1937), as Frankie Peterson
- *Grand Jury* (1936), as George Taylor
- *My American Wife* (1936), as Lafe Cantillon
- *The Farmer in the Dell* (1936), as Pa Boyer
- *The Trail of the Lonesome Pine* (1936), as Judd Tolliver
- *Alice Adams* (1935), as Virgil Adams — Fi1m 79, [page](https://film.one/film/alice-adams.md)
- *Billy Jim* (1922), as Billy Jim
- *The Duke of Chimney Butte* (1921), as Jeremeah Lambert · Producer
- *Johnny Get Your Gun* (1919), as Johnny Wiggins
- *Under the Top* (1919), as Jimmie Jones
- *The Goat* (1918), as Chuck McCarthy
- *Destiny: or, the Soul of a Woman* (1915), as Parishioner
- *Dancing Boxing Match, Montgomery and Stone* (1907), as Con Kidder

## Gallery

- ![Fred Stone](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-c17976579bed.jpg) Fred Stone — Strauss-Peyton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/Nvayearbook192610nati_0018_Fred_Stone.jpg/1280px-Nvayearbook192610nati_0018_Fred_Stone.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Fred A. Stone, stage actor Subjects: actors (1911)](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-3ff0d9bae552.jpg) Fred A. Stone, stage actor Subjects: actors (1911) — Studio of George Moffett, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Fred_A_Stone%2C_stage_actor_%28SAYRE_9102%29.jpg/1280px-Fred_A_Stone%2C_stage_actor_%28SAYRE_9102%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Actor Fred Stone](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-88a533fe79ce.jpg) Actor Fred Stone — Moffett, Chicago, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Fred_Stone_Nvasouvenir192307nati_0010.jpg/1280px-Fred_Stone_Nvasouvenir192307nati_0010.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Fred A. Stone, stage actor Subjects: actors (1912)](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-6c5845adfcad.jpg) Fred A. Stone, stage actor Subjects: actors (1912) — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Fred_A_Stone%2C_stage_actor_%28SAYRE_1109%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Fred Stone](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-591cbdc7f880.jpg) Fred Stone — Image via TMDB
- ![Fred Stone](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-d7d64993b34e.jpg) Fred Stone — Image via TMDB
- ![Actor Fred Stone](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-89b1f9e9313f.jpg) Actor Fred Stone — Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Nvasouvenir192408nati_0015_Fred_Stone.jpg/1280px-Nvasouvenir192408nati_0015_Fred_Stone.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![A scene from "The Wizard of Oz," which opened Oct. 16, 1904, at the Grand Opera House, Seattle. Includes David Montgomery (right) and Fred Stone (left). Subject](https://film.one/media/person/1227923/gallery-44d83a5beec4.jpg) A scene from "The Wizard of Oz," which opened Oct. 16, 1904, at the Grand Opera House, Seattle. Includes David Montgomery (right) and Fred Stone (left). Subject — Joseph Byron, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/A_scene_from_%22The_Wizard_of_Oz%22_%28SAYRE_12278%29.jpg/1280px-A_scene_from_%22The_Wizard_of_Oz%22_%28SAYRE_12278%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)

---
© 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/fred-stone