He shared the screen with Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Clark Gable, to name a few. He was directed by such giants as John Huston, William Wyler and Josef von Sternberg.

Alas, Roland Got is but a footnote in the history of classic Hollywood and San Francisco, where he was born and raised. And yet this month, when he would have turned 100, it’s worth noting that his story could in itself make a great movie: The San Francisco-born son of Chinese immigrants who grew up tall, athletic and impossibly handsome, made big movies, fought in World War II, then died at age 32 in a freak accident aboard a ferry between Oakland and San Francisco.

“Roland Got was a pioneering Asian American actor who, like Anna May Wong, starred in nearly 30 films which spanned the ’30s and ’40s,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who as a film director has explored race in Hollywood in the documentaries “The Slanted Screen” and “You Don’t Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story.”

“He was tall, handsome and commanding, and he was often the only Asian actor cast with white actors in yellowface, such as in ‘The Good Earth,’” Adachi said. “But he also played that rare Asian American character in mostly white-cast films and became a well-known face.”

So here’s a little about Got, who would have turned 100 on Aug. 6. Born to a Chinese immigrant tailor and a San Francisco Chinatown seamstress, he spent his first years in Chinatown. By high school the Got family had relocated to Southern California. MGM talent scouts discovered him when he was 18, signed him to a contract, and put him through a year of training to become an actor.

“I remember him as being very charming and multitalented,” said Herlinda Got Mahler, Got’s daughter, by phone from her home in Rancho Cucamonga (San Bernardino County). “I truly believe he should have been a graphic designer, as they call them today. … He made his own Christmas cards.”

Got’s first role was as the younger son — of white actors (in yellowface makeup) Paul Muni and Luise Rainer — in “The Good Earth,” the adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It was one of the most prestigious productions in Hollywood at the time, personally supervised by producer Irving S. Thalberg. Nominated for best picture, the film won two Oscars, including Rainer as best actress.

That movie was a sign of Got’s future in Hollywood. Wong was supposed to have gotten the lead role, but Thalberg that decided the American public wasn’t ready to see Asian actors in lead roles — even in a movie about peasant farmers in China — so the studio went with Rainer. Audiences were deemed to be able to accept Asians in secondary roles, so the cast was filled out by actors such as Got — billed here as Roland Lui — and Keye Luke.

For the next six years, many of Got’s characters didn’t have actual names. He was credited as House Boy, Clerk, Bellhop, Rickshaw Driver, Japanese Soldier, Illegal Alien — and, in Wyler’s “The Letter,” an uncredited role listed by IMDb as “undetermined role.” (He is the Malaysian servant sent by Davis to tell husband Herbert Marshall that she has shot her lover.)

He loved acting, but “he sat by the phone a lot waiting for his agent to call offering him parts,” recalled Got Mahler, who was 7 when her father died. “My mother would urge him to go into some other line of work.”

In some roles, flashes of his gifts are evident. He has a few nice comedic scenes with Bogart in Huston’s “Across the Pacific.” As a ship’s steward, he shows Bogart to his quarters and proceeds to show him how to use the fold-out bathroom — the two exchange glances and nods when it comes to that most vital part of a bathroom’s functions, not to be shown or discussed in a 1942 film.

But at least two roles beyond “The Good Earth” showed the potential of what he could have achieved on a level playing field. In “Extortion,” a 1938 B mystery directed by the gifted if underrated genre filmmaker Lambert Hillyer (“Dracula’s Daughter,” the original “Batman”), Got is a student at a small college questioned in the murder of an administrator. Got pretty much gets to play himself — sophisticated, American, educated.

Then there’s his only starring role — as an agent in “G-Men vs. the Black Dragon,” a 1943 action-packed 15-part weekly serial from Republic Pictures teaming Got with Rod Cameron as agents working to foil an insidious plot by Japanese agents. Getting a serial then was like getting your own TV series today.

Unfortunately, that was one of his last roles. Got shipped off to World War II to fight in the European theater. After returning from the war, Got suffered from severe stomach problems, and he spent years consulting with doctors trying to diagnose and treat his condition. But on Nov. 30, 1948, he was traveling on a ferry on a foggy night in choppy conditions after doing some Christmas shopping when he had a painful stomach episode. He went to the railing, leaned over — possibly to vomit — and fell in.

His body washed ashore about a month later. The coroner ruled it an accidental drowning.

Who knows what kind of postwar career Got could have had? There would have been some roles out there for him — Hollywood movies with Asian-related themes became popular in Hollywood in the 1950s.

“His legacy still lives on through the films he acted in, many of which, like ‘The Shanghai Gesture,’ are considered classics,” said Adachi, referring to a 1941 film directed by von Sternberg that starred Victor Mature and Gene Tierney.

But for Got Mahler, the loss in her personal life outweighs any loss to film history. She grew to adulthood, became a Miss Chinatown at 22 and started a family (two children, three grandchildren) without a father to share it with.

“I was so little when Daddy died. ... I was left with some painful memories,” she said. “Now, when I get to see him in an old film, I think, ‘Wow! That’s my dad!’ And I remember our happier times.”

G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen

About Roland Got

Born: Aug. 6, 1916, San Francisco

Died: Nov. 30, 1948, between Oakland and S.F.

Suggested movies on home video: “The Good Earth” and “Across the Pacific” are available on DVD and streaming.

Trailer: “G-Men vs. The Black Dragon” (https://youtu.be/PTw0UCWC2l8)

More information: Got’s daughter, Herlinda Got Mahler, and film enthusiast Richard Harrison have collaborated on a website, www.rolandgot.com, which inlcudes extensive video clips, photos and a remembrance.