Leon Beaumon

Leon Beaumon - also credited as Leon Beauman, Beaumont, and Leon Duval - was a minor stage and film actor during the 1920s and 1930s. He wasborn Herman Bauman in 1898 on a farm near Youngstown, Ohio, to German immigrant parents. He worked in steel mills as a youth, and studied with his two brothers near Chicago to be a Catholic priest. However, in 1920 Herman had an argument with one of his superiors in the seminary and set out for California to become a movie star, persuading his younger brother, Marty, to join him. In their migration West, during Prohibition, they worked in a still and ran hooch in Denver. Once in Hollywood they changed their last name to Beaumon and Herman became Leon. Leon and Marty lived in a boarding house in Hollywood along with Clark Gable and John Wayne before the latter two found fame and fortune. They were all poor enough, and close enough in size, that the four men owned one suit of clothes among them, and scheduled their auditions around one another to wear the suit. Leon's filmography is largely a mystey, due to the passage of time and his legendary attempts to hide his true age; thus he gave few details of his Hollywood career to his children. From a scrapbook, archival sources, and his lifelong friend and fellow actor, the late Bob St. Angelo, it is known so far that he had credited roles in A Fight to the Finish (1925), Clancy of the Mounted (1933), Pioneer Trail (1938) and The Law Comes to Texas (1939). He had uncredited r…