Biografia

He was notoriously abusive towards the juvenile performers he supposedly adored onscreen. For one scene in Navio Negreiro (1937), he had to slap his 16 year-old co-star Mickey Rooney across the face. Beery didn't fake the action and, without warning, slapped Rooney so hard he was knocked to the floor, spoiling the take and causing outrage among the crew. Director Tay Garnett took Beery aside and told him that everyone on the set loved Rooney, and that it would be most unfortunate if some lighting equipment were to "accidentally" fall on Beery's head. Beery got the message and behaved himself for the rest of the shoot. Interestingly, Rooney was one of the very few actors to work with Beery who later expressed no resentment towards him. He said, "Not everyone loved him the way I did". When Dickie Moore interviewed former child stars for his 1984 book "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" Wallace Beery and W.C. Fields were the two actors the child stars disliked working with the most. Jackie Cooper said about Beery "We did four long films together" and "They couldn't find eight guys to carry his casket.".

At MGM his public image was carefully crafted by studio publicity chief Howard Strickling as that of a big lovable slob with a heart of gold. In reality, however, Beery was anything but that. Co-star Jackie Cooper said that Beery treated him like an unwanted dog the second the cameras stopped.

When the Academy Awards were first presented, the winners were announced ahead of the ceremony, partly with the hope the recipients would show up to collect their award. When it was announced that the winner of the 1931 prize for best actor went to Fredric March, Beery reportedly stormed into the office of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, demanding he be given the award instead. The result was a "tie" for Best Actor that year. From then on the Oscar votes were tabulated by Price Waterhouse, and the winners announced at the ceremony.

He took up flying in 1925, and from then until 1941 he accumulated 14,000 hours of flight time as a pilot. While making A Ilha do Tesouro (1934) on Santa Catalina Island, he commuted daily by plane from his Beverly Hills home.

In December of 1939, right after divorcing his second wife, Beery adopted a seven-month-old girl, Phyllis Anne, as a single father. She appears in the 1940 United States census listed as a foster daughter in the Beery household under the name Phyllis Riley. Nevada is named as her birthplace.