Biography

Rags Ragland was a boxer, then a burlesque comedian and then a Broadway performer before ending up in Hollywood to repeat his stage role as the boisterous sailor in Panama Hattie (1942), in which Ann Sothern played on film the part that had been played on Broadway by Ethel Merman. Ragland, typecast as a good-natured oaf with a knack for fracturing the English language, had as his sole movie employer Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in some two dozen of whose lighter vehicles he appeared, in the company of such MGM luminaries as Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.