Donald Crisp

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Donald Crisp (born July 27, 1882 in Bow near London , † May 25, 1974 in Van Nuys , California ; actually George William Crisp ) was a British actor , director , producer and businessman who mainly worked in the United States . His successful film career spanned from the early days of silent films to the early 1960s. He has appeared as an actor in over 170 films and has also directed over 70 films. In 1941, Crisp won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his appearance in Schlagende Wetter .

Life

Donald Crisp as Ulysses S. Grant (1915)

George William Crisp was born in Bow near London in 1882 to James and Elizabeth Crisp. He had four sisters and three brothers. After training at Eton College and Oxford , he served in the Boer War for the British Army. In 1906 Crisp was traveling as a singer on a ship to the United States when he was noticed by the impresario John C. Fisher at a small ship concert. Thereupon Fisher hired the young man as a singer and brought him to New York City . On a tour through the United States and Cuba with a group of singers, Crisp's interest in acting developed. Between April and August 1908 he worked on Broadway in the play The Yankee Prince as an actor. On Broadway, he also worked temporarily as a stage manager for the shows of George M. Cohan . Also in 1908, Crisp made his first film, when the cinema was still in its infancy. Numerous films followed, in which he now appeared under the stage name Donald Crisp .

The actor befriended director David Wark Griffith and both moved to Hollywood to join the fledgling film industry in 1912 . Griffith used Crisp in several of his films, including as General Ulysses S. Grant in the war epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), a milestone in film history. In The Birth of a Nation and other films, he also worked as assistant director on the side of Griffith. From 1914 onwards, Crisp directed a total of over 70 films by the end of the silent film era. Among other things, he shot for the New York film company Biograph . His most important films as a director include the comedy The Navigator (1924), where he co-directed with Buster Keaton , and Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) with Douglas Fairbanks in the lead role. In addition to directing, Crisp continued to play film roles, including starring in Joan the Woman , directed by Cecil B. DeMille . He had his best-known silent film role in Griffiths Broken Blossoms from 1919, where he beats his film daughter ( Lillian Gish ) to death in the role of a sadistic boxer .

During the First World War he worked for the British Army . During the Second World War, despite his age, he worked again for the US Army and achieved the rank of colonel .

With the start of talkies in the late 1920s, Crisp ended his career as a director, but established himself successfully as a supporting actor and was under contract with First National . He often embodied edgy and authoritarian, but honorable men. In The White Angel from 1936, Crisp was seen as the adversary of Florence Nightingale , played by Kay Francis . Both appeared together again the following year in Confession and Comet Over Broadway . He played alongside leading film stars of his time, for example with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), with Laurence Olivier and David Niven as Dr. Kenneth in the literary adaptation Sturmhöhe (1939) and as advisor to Queen Elizabeth in The Lord of the Seven Seas (1941) alongside Errol Flynn . At the Academy Awards in 1942 , Crisp received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his appearance as the strict but loving family patriach in John Ford's miners drama Schlagende Wetter (1940) . Under contract with MGM since the early 1940s , Crisp played, among others, Elizabeth Taylor's father in Little Girl, Big Heart in 1944 . He has also appeared in a few Lassie films. He remained active as an actor until the 1960s. His last of more than 170 films was Summer of Expectation in 1963, where he played the father of Henry Fonda .

In addition to his film work, he was a successful businessman and also advised Bank of America , which was the main lender for the film industry at the time. With his advice, Crisp was jointly responsible for whether film productions ultimately received loans or, if so, no loans. That made him an influential person in Hollywood . His first marriage to Marie Stark was divorced in 1919. His second marriage to the author Jane Murfin (1884–1955) lasted from 1932 to 1944. Donald Crisp died in 1974 at the age of 91 after a series of heart attacks and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale .

Filmography

Actor (selection)

Directorial work (selection)

  • 1914: Her Father's Silent Partner
  • 1918: Rimrock Jones
  • 1918: The House of Silence
  • 1921: The Princess of New York
  • 1921: The Bonnie Brier Bush
  • 1922: Tell Your Children
  • 1924: The Navigator (The Navigator)
  • 1925: The Man with the Whip ( Don Q Son of Zorro )
  • 1926: Sunny Side Up
  • 1927: Nobody's Widow
  • 1927: Man Bait
  • 1927: Vanity
  • 1927: The Fighting Eagle
  • 1927: Dress Parade
  • 1928: Stand and Deliver
  • 1928: The Cop

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography New York Times , online, (English)
personal data
SURNAME Crisp, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crisp, George William (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actor and director
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Bow near London
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1974
Place of death Van Nuys , California