Tex Brodus was a cherubic-faced actor, dancer, and musician who had a long career as a background actor in Hollywood films. Milton Homan Broaddus spent his early years in Caldwell, Texas not far from his birthplace of Somerville in Burleston County. His father died in 1907 and his mother supported the family as telephone operator, later moving the family to Dallas and remarrying. Brodus had left school by the age of fifteen and was employed as a clerk for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. By 1924, he was working as a musician, although in what capacity has not been determined. Sometime between 1928 and 1933, Brodus made his way to Hollywood and began appearing as a dancer in film musicals. He adopted the first name Richard and simplified the spelling of his last name for professional use, but the nickname "Tex" stuck and became his standard moniker thereafter.
Brodus was noted as a promising student of Fox Laboratory Theatre (the Fox Films studio acting school) in 1935, but this did not succeed in elevating him above uncredited dancing, background, and bit parts. Although it is not clear if Brodus was able to exercise his musical talents in Hollywood, his singing voice can be heard in one brief segment of Musik ist unsere Welt (1939), where he was enlisted to overdub Cliff Edwards’s vocals of the song "Singin’ in the Rain" in a reused clip from The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929). Over about thirty-five years, Brodus appeared extensively as chorus boy, party guest, nightclub patron, and a multitude of similar background roles, but given that his work in feature films was virtually always uncredited, the complete list is likely much more extensive than those that have come to light. In his later career, he appeared on television with increasing frequency, notably as a regular supporting player on The Red Skelton Show (later known as The Red Skelton Show (1951)) in the 1954-55 season and in periodic episodes of Wagon Train (1957) between 1958 and 1960.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Brodus served several terms as an elected officer of the Screen Extras Guild. He also served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II. Although the nature of their relationship is unclear, Brodus was a close associate of silent-screen and prolific extra actor George Calliga, with whom he lived for a period after the death of Calliga’s wife, and with both of whom his ashes are interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
