The Men of Griffith's Films

I got to thinking about some of the men who starred in Griffith's films in those early days. I've already posted about Walthall, Bobby Harron, and Bobby's brother John.

It's a sobering thing to think about. A fair number of the men who acted in his early films, died young or middle-aged:

Charles Avery (1873 - 1926). One of the original Keystone Kops. Suicide.

Elmer Booth (1882 - 1915). Booth and fellow Griffith actor George Siegmann were in a car driven by not-yet-famous director Tod Browning when Browning ran the car headlong into a moving train. Booth was killed instantly; Browning and Siegmann were seriously injured.

Thomas H. Ince (1882 - 1924). There's an interesting story. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure. However, Ince had been aboard the Oneida, the yacht belonging to William Randolph Hearst, for a birthday party (his own); rumors flew, and persist to this day, that Ince was actually shot by Hearst. The rumor is that Hearst's lover, Marion Davies, had been carrying on with fellow party guest Charlie Chaplin, and that the insanely jealous Hearst drew a gun on Chaplin, intending to kill him, only to miss and shoot Ince in the head. Since Ince's body was cremated, the story could never be disproven.

Owen Moore (1886 - 1939). Heart attack. He was Mary Pickford's first husband, and he died the same year, of the same ailment, as her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks.

Jack Pickford (1895 - 1933). Mary Pickford's younger brother. The cause of death was given as multiple neuritis, but Jack was also a heavy drinker and suffered from syphilis. His first wife, popular star Olive Thomas, died in Paris in 1920 at the age of 25, after swallowing mercury bichloride. Rumors of suicide persist, but it seems far more likely to me that she mistook the glass of the bichloride solution for ordinary water.

Wallace Reid (1891 - 1923). Cause of death given as influenza. Reid was a heavy drinker even before he was badly injured working on a film in 1919. A doctor was dispatched to the set to keep him doped up with morphine so he could keep working. Reid soon became hooked on the drug, and went into one sanitarium after another in fruitless attempts to kick the habit. His death (along with the Roscoe Arbuckle trial and the murder of director William Desmond Taylor) was one of the major scandals to rock Hollywood within a period of two years, helping to usher in the stifling Hays Production Code.