#hal roach studios

Ernest Morrison was an actor and vaudeville performer who was born in New Orleans on December 12th, 1912. He performed and was credited under a number of stage names, the most famous of which being Sunshine Sammy Morrison. He was the first African American actor to be signed to a long-term Hollywood contract, specifically to Hal Roach Studios in 1919, where he performed alongside Harold Lloyd in a number of comedy shorts before being the first actor cast in Roach’s Our Gang serials. Morrison eventually left the studio over a payment dispute in 1926, and began to perform on the vaudeville circuit. He returned to film in 1940, when he was cast in The East Side Kids serials, playing a teenager, despite the fact he was almost 30. He was drafted in the American Military late in the war alongside a number of his East Side Kids costars, and was among the lucky few to survive. Upon returning from the war, he was offered a role in the successor series to The East Side Kids, but turned it down. He would not return to acting until 1974, for a bit part in an episode of the American sitcom Good Times. He spent most of his adulthood after the war working as a quality control inspector for an aerospace company. Morrison died of cancer on July 24th, 1989.

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