Gay Seabrook on AllMovie

Gay Seabrook was a comic actress who enjoyed a 15-year career on stage, radio, and in movies. Specializing in zany roles, she portrayed characters whose ditziness fell somewhere midway between Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball, and appeared in 21 movies made between 1931 and 1940, of which the best known were a pair of Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts, Bedtime Worries and Wild Poses. In the latter film, she has one of the silliest and funniest lines in the history of the film series, when water inadvertently sprays out of a camera and she tries to calm her son, saying, "That's how they take water color pictures," eliciting on-screen double-takes from everyone in the shot. In both 1933 films, Seabrook played the mother of Spanky McFarland and the wife of Emerson Treacy (she and Treacy were also an established and successful double-act on radio and stage, a kind of poor man's George Burns/Gracie Allen duo). Her daffiness and his slow burn made them a memorably funny team. Seabrook made her debut with the Harry Duffy Players, working with Leo Carrillo and Frank Craven before entering motion pictures in the early '30s. Apart from her work with Treacy, she was probably most famous during the 1930s for her appearances on Joe Penner's radio show, portraying a character called Susabella, who was one of Penner's most popular stooges. By 1940, she'd left Hollywood in favor of a return to the stage, where she played Mabel in a new production of Three Men On A Horse that toured the United States and Australia. Thanks to the constant television reruns of the Little Rascals movies beginning at the end of the 1950s, Seabrook is best remembered today for Bedtime Worries and Wild Poses.