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Jed Prouty (born Clarence Gordon Prouty; April 6, 1879 – May 10, 1956) was an American film actor. Today's audiences may recognize him as the stammering vaudeville booker in The Broadway Melody (1929), the theater manager in Laurel and Hardy's Hollywood Party (1934), the oily publicist in A Star is Born (1937), the chief of the Keystone Cops in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), and the network-radio executive in James Stewart's Pot o' Gold (1941).
After a significant career in silent films, notably in the Colleen Moore features Ella Cinders (1926) and Orchids and Ermine (1927), Jed Prouty established himself in the new field of talking pictures with a comic role in the wildly successful early musical The Broadway Melody (1929). His performance in the independent production Bachelor of Arts (1934), released by Fox, landed him a contract with Fox, where he appeared with Will Rogers in Life Begins at 40 (1934). While at Fox played the lead in the domestic comedy Every Saturday Night (1936); with the studio pursuing a wide-ranging program of film series, Prouty became the principal character in the Jones Family film series. Seventeen low-budget family comedies were produced between 1936 and 1940, along with Spring Byington as Mrs. Jones, for such directors as Malcolm St. Clair and Frank R. Strayer.
Jed Prouty's appearance in Fox's Technicolor tribute to silent comedies, Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) earned him good notices, and on the strength of these he tried to renegotiate his contract. This cost him his berth at Fox, as Ivan Spear of Boxoffice reported: "20th Century-Fox's newest chapter of is marked by the absence, for the first time, of "Pa" -- Jed Prouty. His recent contractual difficulties with the studio made it necessary for writers to eliminate the head of the family from the script, which they did through the expedient of a nervous breakdown."Ivan Spear, Boxoffice, Apr. 13, 1940, p. 23. The film, On Their Own (1940), concluded the series.
Prouty also starred in a couple of short-subject comedies for RKO Radio Pictures in 1938 and 1939. He continued to play character roles in pictures through 1950, and on television through 1952.
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