Why don't we know Franklyn Farnum?

I was thinking idly about actors appearing in best picture winners the other day. I decided to find out which actor has appeared in the most best picture winners, and of course, that's just the kind of information Wikipedia is eager to offer me.

The vast majority of actors on Wikipedia's "List of actors appearing in multiple Best Picture winners" have appeared in two or three films, but there are a few who went beyond that. Wallis Clark was fortunate enough to appear in five, all of them in the 1930s, while Bess Flowers equaled that total, split between the 1930s and 1950s. (I guess she spent the 1940s recovering from a terrible heroin addiction, leading her to a period of heroine withdrawal. Get it? Heroine?)

Head and shoulders above the others was an actor who appeared in a whopping seven best picture winners: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Going My Way (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), All About Eve (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

But perhaps the more remarkable thing about Franklyn Farnum is that he is listed as having 1,100 film credits overall. That's a lot.

The even more remarkable thing is that I've never heard of him.

I'm no expert on classic Hollywood -- I don't know Wallis Clark or Bess Flowers either -- but if someone had appeared in 1,100 movies and seven best picture winners, I feel like I should know about him, if not from his actual body of work, then at least as the answer to a trivia question.

But nope, totally in the dark on Farnum, and the picture of him doesn't even help me say "Oh yeah, that guy."

I guess back in those days, especially if you were under contract from a studio, it was more like a 9 to 5 job than the project-based acting of today. If they needed someone to walk through the background of a movie and maybe say one line, there was Franklyn Farnum, having a cigarette outside of a sound stage and waiting for his next assignment. Maybe the more remarkable thing is that someone actually noticed he was in all these movies and committed his feat to permanence via Wikipedia.

I looked through Farnum's 1,100 credits on IMDB and it turns out I've only seen ... nah, I didn't do that. Even I am not that crazy. I know I've seen seven of his films, anyway, since I've seen every best picture winner. I'm sure you can add a dozen others.

I wonder if Farnum was even appreciated in his time, recognized as a familiar face by the average moviegoer. His best picture accomplishment -- something he himself was certainly aware of -- would probably not have been general knowledge until the internet age, relying as it does on resources like IMDB.

Today, it seems hard to imagine any actor with this ability to spread himself over multiple quality projects, which means his record is likely never to fall. As some indication of that, among actors still living, no one has more than three, though there are about ten of those. There are the names you might expect in that group, like Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman and Dustin Hoffman; names you'd expect if you thought about it for a second, like Talia Shire; and names you would not expect, like Beth Grant. 

If this post can contribute in some small way to the world knowing about Franklyn Farnum -- Frank to his friends -- then I'm glad to oblige.