Phillips Holmes

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Phillips Holmes (born July 22, 1907 in Grand Rapids , Michigan , USA ; † August 12, 1942 in Armstrong , Ontario , Canada ) was a Canadian-American film and stage actor .

Life

Phillips Holmes was born to the actor couple Taylor Holmes and Edna Phillips. He also had a sister and a brother, Ralph Holmes, who also became an actor. Holmes was also a Canadian citizen through his mother.

After extras in two films in 1918 and 1925, respectively, Holmes was discovered by Frank Tuttle in the extras for his film Varsity in 1928. After a test run, the unusually handsome actor was given a major supporting role in the film and a long-term contract with Paramount . After filming in the New York branch of the studio, Holmes went to Hollywood and developed into a popular leading and supporting actor in the years of upheaval from silent to sound films. He was almost always to be seen next to the big stars of those days, such as Jean Arthur , Clara Bow , Fay Wray , Gary Cooper or Fredric March .

Holmes made his breakthrough in Edmund Goulding's tragic romance The Devil's Holiday alongside Nancy Carroll . Here he played a trickster who enters into a brief love affair with a poor girl played by Carroll. The film was a great financial and artistic success and the two actors made several films together in the following years. Paramount emphasized Holmes' status as an elegant, aseptically beautiful lover, and his roles became increasingly sophisticated. Howard Hawks, for example, cast him in his 1930 prison drama The Criminal Code as an unstable prisoner caught in a conflict of conscience between the prisoner's code of silence and his moral integrity. In 1931 Holmes starred alongside Sylvia Sidney in the well-known film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's socially critical novel An American Tragedy . Originally Sergei Eisenstein was supposed to take over the direction, but the concept seemed too radical to the producers and ultimately the film was made by Josef von Sternberg . Holmes was seen as an amoral young man trying to escape poverty and drowning his pregnant mistress in order to marry a rich girl. The film became a box office hit. His next film but one, The Man Who Drilled His Conscience , in which Holmes starred alongside Nancy Carroll for the last time, was not a financial success. Because of this flop, director Ernst Lubitsch only turned comedies afterwards.

In 1933 Phillips Holmes moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In the previous year he completed the lead role in Night Court alongside John Barrymore . He was now primarily used in supporting roles, many of the productions were failures at the box office. An A-production in which Holmes was seen alongside Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler is dinner at eight by George Cukor . In addition to The Secret of Madame Blanche , in which he played the son of Irene Dunne , Storm at Daybreak at the side of Kay Francis and Penthouse with the new top star Myrna Loy , Edgar Selwyn's Men Must Fight , in which a second must be highlighted World War is forecast for 1940. The reason for the quick departure from MGM after only one year and eight films is likely to have been a car accident that Holmes caused while he was drunk. His co-driver, actress Mae Clarke , was seriously injured in the face.

In the future, Holmes could only be seen in leading roles, but he worked for various studios without a long-term contract. Between 1935 and 1938 he was also seen in four English productions. After films like the crime thriller Million Dollar Ransom and the musical Maddalena with Marta Eggerth , Phillips Holmes ended his career in front of the camera with the comedy Housemaster . He moved his activities to the theater stage for about a year, but with the expanding war in the world he ended that too.

There is speculation that Holmes was homosexual. Studio managers were not only reluctant to see homosexuality for ostensibly moral reasons, but also for reasons of image that a heartthrob like Holmes kept secret. Although he had a relationship with casual actress Libby Holman around 1938 , the millionaire heiress had numerous platonic relationships with homosexuals, including Clifton Webb and Montgomery Clift . In 1939, Holman surprisingly married Phillips' brother, Ralph Holmes, who either accidentally or desperate about his sexuality threw himself out of a window in 1945.

Phillips Holmes enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in late 1941 and completed training courses. He died on August 12, 1942. On the way to a new location, the transport plane in which he and at least six comrades were sitting collided with another plane over Ontario. Nobody survived the accident.

A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame commemorates Phillips Holmes.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/josef-von-sternberg-movies/
  2. ↑ Men Must Fight. May 14, 2019, Retrieved May 20, 2019 (American English).
  3. ↑ Before They Fade from View: Phillips Holmes. Retrieved May 20, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Libby Holman. Retrieved May 20, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Ralph Holmes. Retrieved May 20, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Holmes, Phillips
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American film and stage actor
DATE OF BIRTH July 22, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Grand Rapids , Michigan , USA
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1942
Place of death near Armstrong , Ontario , Canada