Walter Brennan is great in every movie. He wasn't that old.. I was very surprised.. he always played the old one...
Here's good background info on him I compiled:
"Walter Brennan was a great character actor from the 1920s to the 1970s. Amazingly, it took him many years to get beyond playing uncredited roles! He had served in World War I (and supposedly he was exposed to mustard gas, which damaged his vocal chords and caused his distinctive voice!), and then he moved to Los Angeles where he speculated on real estate and made a fortune. But then he went broke, and he turned to movie acting in 1925, where he met struggling actor Gary Cooper, and the two became great friends, trying to get roles at the same time. But unlike Cooper, who became a major star, Brennan spent almost a decade playing very minor roles (often uncredited). In 1932, he had an accident while filming a movie and lost most of his teeth, and from that point on, he played people much older than himself, often hillbillies! But he finally had a major role in "Come and Get It" in 1936, and he won the first Best Supporting Actor Oscar (the first of three he would win), and he had major success from then on. Some of his roles include Red River, Bride of Frankenstein, and My Darling Clementine. He appeared in several movies with Gary Cooper, including Sergeant York and Meet John Doe. He had much fame later in life as the star of TV's "The Real McCoys".
