Philip Coolidge

Philip Coolidge (August 5, 1908 – May 23, 1967) was an American stage, film, and television actor, who performed predominantly in supporting roles during a career that spanned over three decades, from 1930 to the late 1960s. Early life Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1908, Philip was the youngest of eight children of Mary (née Colt) and Sidney E. Coolidge, who was the treasurer for a local textile company and later the owner of a bleachery.<ref name="Massbirths">"Births Registered in the Town of Concord for the Year Nineteen Hundred and Eight", Philip Coolidge, August 25, 1908; parents: Sydney E. Coolidge and Mary L. Colt, residents Concord, Massachusetts; registry, "Massachusetts Births, 1841—1915", p. 422, birth number 4611. Digital copy of original handwritten registry accessed via FamilySearch online archives, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 6, 2022.</ref> The 1910 federal census documents that the Coolidge household included two live-in maids and a full-time cook, indications that Sydney's executive positions and income provided his family with an upper-class lifestyle. That status also allowed Philip later to attend the prestigious Milton Academy, where he completed his secondary education. Stage career Following his graduation from Milton, Philip worked initially in radio, serving as an announcer for a station in Boston. Soon, though, he chose another career path, one as a stage actor. In 1930 he made his debut with the Peabody Repertory Company in Boston, playing four different roles in the troupe's production of Romeo and Juliet. Coolidge over the next several years performed in assorted plays in Boston, at the Globe Theatre in Chicago, and elsewhere with traveling companies. By 1938 he began acting regularly in New York City, where that year he was cast as the church organist Simon Stimson in the original Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, which was presented at Henry Miller's Theatre and co-starred Frank Craven and Martha Scott. Over the next 26 years, even after he expanded his acting career into films and television, Coolidge continued to appear in a wide variety of stage productions, including many more on Broadway. He performed there in the 1940s in plays such as Suzanna and the Elders, In Time to Come, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, Barefoot Boy With Cheek, and The Traitor.