Walter Pidgeon Movies

pidgeon 111111Want to know the best Walter Pidgeon movies?  How about the worst Walter Pidgeon movies?  Curious about Walter Pidgeon box office grosses or which Walter Pidgeon movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Walter Pidgeon movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Walter Pidgeon (1897-1984)  was a Canadian American Oscar®-nominated actor.  His movie career spanned an incredible 52 years. His IMDb page shows 138 acting credits from 1926-1978. This page ranks 76 Walter Pidgeon movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, documentaries, shorts and his silent films were not included in the rankings.

Drivel part of the page:  This page comes from a subtle hint from Marcel.  Marcel recently commented on our Greer Garson page. He asked the question….”Why is Walter Pidgeon’s name not blue in the Co-Star column?”   Well the answer to that question…and an answer he knew….was we did not have a Walter Pidgeon page…..well we do now.  Thankfully, Pidgeon, spent many years working at MGM….so we were able to find lots of great box office information on his movies.

Walter Pidgeon in 1956's Forbidden Planet...maybe having a picture of movie will ease Steve's pain when he looks at rankings.
Walter Pidgeon in 1956’s Forbidden Planet…maybe having a picture of this movie will ease Steve’s pain when he looks at the overall rankings.

Walter Pidgeon Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Walter Pidgeon movies by co-stars of his movies
  • Sort Walter Pidgeon movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Walter Pidgeon movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Walter Pidgeon movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Walter Pidgeon movie received.
  • Sort Walter Pidgeon movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR)Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • *** If worldwide box office is the same as domestic box office then it means we could not find the worldwide box office gross

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Walter Pidgeon Table

  1. Twenty-six Walter Pidgeon movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 34.21% of his movies listed. Mrs. Miniver (1942) was his biggest box office hit.
  2. An average Walter Pidgeon movie grosses $94.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. That translates to a career adjusted box office of $7.15 billion.
  4. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  40 Walter Pidgeon movies are rated as good movies…or 52.63% of his movies.  The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is his highest rated movie while Sextette (1978) is his lowest rated movie.
  5. Fifteen Walter Pidgeon movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 19.73% of his movies.
  6. Five Walter Pidgeon movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 6.57% of his movies.
  7. An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 32 Walter Pidgeon movies scored higher that average….or 42.10% of his movies.  Mrs. Miniver (1942) got the the highest UMR Score while Sextette (1978) got the lowest UMR Score.
Walter Pidgeon in 1961's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Walter Pidgeon in 1961’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Possibly Interesting Facts About Walter Pidgeon

1. Walter Davis Pidgeon was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada in 1897.

2. Fred Astaire heard Walter Pidgeon singing at a party while appearing with an amateur company in Boston and got him an agent.  Pidgeon would first gain fame for his singing voice in some of the first sound musicals ever made.

3. Greer Garson played the wife of Walter Pidgeon a total of eight times; in 1941’s Blossoms in the Dust,1942’s Mrs. Miniver,1943’s Madame Curie, 1944’s Mrs. Parkington, 1948’s Julia Misbehaves , 1950’s The Miniver Story, 1949’s That Forsyte Woman and 1953’s  Scandal at Scourie.  They also both appeared in 1943’s The Youngest Profession.

4.  The Greer Garson/Walter Pidgeon duo was one of the most successful screen teams ever.  Their 9 movies earned $1.47 BILLION when looking at adjusted North America grosses.

5.  Walter Pidgeon was nominated for two Best Actor Oscars®:  1942’s Mrs. Miniver and 1943’s Madame Curie.

6. Walter Pidgen and Ryan Gosling are the only two Canadians to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar®. Pidgeon held the distinction alone for 64 years.

7. Walter Pidgeon starred in back to back Best Picture Oscar® winners. 1941’s How Green Was My Valley and 1942’s Mrs. Miniver.

8. Walter Pidgeon was married two times and had one child.  His first wife Edna died in 1926 while giving birth to their daughter, Edna.  His second wife, Ruth, was his secretary before they got married.  They were married from 1931 till his death in 1984.

9. Walter Pidgeon had a notoriously poor memory for names, referring to anyone whose name he could not remember as “Joe.” This became such a habit that, for his birthday one year, the cast and crew of the picture he was working on bought him a present: A director’s chair enscribed “Joe Pidgeon.”

10. Check out Walter Pidgeon ‘s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Collateral Damage Section:  While researching this page we discovered better box office information on the following movies: (1) Julia Misbehaves (1948) box office moved up….Elizabeth Taylor page updated.  (2) Executive Suite (1954) box office moved down….William Holden & Shelley Winters pages updated. (3) The Secret Heart (1946) box office moved down….Claudette Colbert & Lionel Barrymore pages updated. (4) That Forsyte Woman (1949) box office moved down….Errol Flynn page updated. (5) Funny Girl (1968) box office moved down….Barbra Streisand page updated.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

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73 thoughts on “Walter Pidgeon Movies”

  2. Hey Flora….yep another Canadian movie subject. You would think I am doing this on purpose…but until I checked to see where he was born….I did not know he was from Canada. 76 movies….a few of his early musicals were left out due to lack of box office. 🙂

    Reply

  3. Hello Bruce,

    I ‘ve seen 7 movies of the list. I would not be on the podium this time either, I suppose. Lol.

    My favorites are Mrs Miniver and How Was Green my Valley.

    I am a big fan of John Ford. I consider he’s one of the greates director of all-time, with Howard Hawks (I am also appreciative of Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston). About John Ford a critic (french I bellieve) asked Orson Wells what were the three greatest directors in his opinion. He answered “John Ford, John Ford and John Ford”.

    Reply

    1. Hey Laurent…..early tall count…and you have second place….me 10…you 7…..so there is a chance…..though probably not good for either one of us…lol.

      How Green Was My Valley was one of the 4 movies that got John Ford a Best Director Oscar. I have pages on all of your favorites except for Walsh and Wellman. Good quote from Wells on Ford….thanks for sharing it.

      Reply

  4. 1 When they think of Walter Pidgeon at all most film goers who are not buffs think of him as Greer Garson’s screen partner and her junior one at that as she played the title roll in their three most famous war-years films together. Because she over-shadowed him there was never too much off-screen chat about him even in my youth.

    2 It was therefore nice to see this Cogerson ‘revival’ of Walter which demonstrates that in a career spanning over half a century he made a staggering 68 identifiable films without Greer Garson and many of them classics – The Bad and the Beautiful, How Green was my Valley, Weekend at the Waldorf. Indeed his body of work in that respect outmatches that of Greer.

    3 Three of Walt’s films dominate in my own memory for different reasons:

    (1) How Green Was My Valley. I was sacked from the Belfast Shipyard for refusing to work without sufficient food breaks. To cheer myself up I travelled to an out-of-town cinema the following day to watch this film for the first time.

    (2) Men of the Fighting Lady. It struck me as ironic even in 1954 that this film should be on a double bill in Belfast with Her Twelve Men which starred Walt’s old partner Greer. Today the irony for me is that although Greer was always regarded as the senior partner Her Twelve Men lost money worldwide whereas Men of the Fighting Lady made an overall 6 million profit in today’s dollars according to Wikipedia..

    (3) The Sellout This is the first CRIME film I can recall seeing a small boy. Bruce’s gross confirms what I sensed even as a youngster which is I was one of the few people interested in it in those days. As Burt said about Atlantic City which both he and the critics loved but which did not initially do big box office: “I think the only people at the premiere were my family and Kirk’s”

    4 To do my own bit to bring the two old partners together once again in a kind of a way I’m next going to do a ‘companion’ post on Greer – and then I’m going to delve into those marvellous Pidgeon worldwide grosses to compare them with his domestic figures

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob.
      1. Thanks for checking out our latest UMR page. Yep he got overshadowed for sure….but I think his own quote about that is a pretty good way to look at it….Pidgeon “Maybe it was better never to become red hot. I’d seen performers like that and they never lasted long. Maybe a long glow is the best way. At Metro I was never considered big enough to squire around Norma Shearer or Joan Crawford or Greta Garbo. Well, I outlasted them all at MGM, didn’t I? It takes a lot of work to appear easy going and I tried to avoid being stuffy.
      2. Yep that other 68 does even include the 14 or 15 movies that did not make the page….there were a few musicals from 1930 that escaped me. Pidgeon was bigger star for about 10 years before Greer and about 20 years after Greer’s peak 1940 run.
      3. I am sure you were not the only one thought it was interesting that Greer and Pidgeon were sharing a double bill movie. My sources did not give the dollar amount earned for Men of the Fighting Lady…my MGM ledgers stop listing that information in 1947.
      4. Good memory (not the part of losing a job) about seeing How Green Was My Valley….did it work? How Green is a bittersweet movie in my opinion.
      5. I am never even heard of The Sell-Out before doing this page. Funny quote from Burt….though Atlantic City is now considered one of his best performances.
      6. Very cool….look forward to that Greer comment…..I like when I can not only find domestic grosses…but the worldwide grosses for that era….I imagine you will be able to find some interesting points when you do your detailed look at the grosses…..all of them come from the Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers…..I just saw Hail Caesar….I smiled when (a) I realized his character was one of the main ones in the movie and (b) at one point he tells his secretary that he needs the box office on a movie….I could almost imagine him filling out the ledgers.
      As always…thanks for sharing your thoughts and movie knowledge.
      3.

      Reply

      1. FLORA
        Thanks. Just caught up on your spammer poem – very funny.

        By the way the version that I heard of Henry 8th was by Herman’s Hermits – is that the one you mean?

        BOBBY

        Reply

  5. MY CANADA RADAR IS WORKING OVERDRIVE.

    Walter was born in Canada.

    This is indeed a massive table and I will comment in detail sometime tomorrow afternoon.

    However:

    Thanks Bruce for completing this table on Walter. He and Greer were one of my favourite screen teams.
    Walter was loved by his costars and neighbours.

    Goodnight.

    Reply

    1. Hey Flora….yep another Canadian movie subject. You would think I am doing this on purpose…but until I checked to see where he was born….I did not know he was from Canada. 76 movies….a few of his early musicals were left out due to lack of box office. 🙂

      Reply

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