Harry Davenport

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Harry Davenport (ca.1895)

Harry Davenport (born January 19, 1866 in Canton , Pennsylvania as Harold George Bryant Davenport , † August 9, 1949 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American actor whose career in this profession spanned a total of 78 years. He has appeared in around 165 films and almost 40 Broadway plays and was one of the founding members of an important drama union. In old age he celebrated considerable success in Hollywood, for example as Dr. Meade in Gone with the Wind (1939). After his death, Bette Davis praised him as "the greatest character actor of all time".

Life

family

Harry Davenport was born in 1866 in the village of Canton, Pennsylvania, where his family had a secondary residence. Born into a long line of theater actors, his parents were Edward Loomis Davenport and Elizabeth Vining . He had eight siblings, two of whom died in childhood. He and most of his other siblings followed in their parents' footsteps, including his sister Fanny Davenport and brother Edgar Loomis Davenport . His sister Lillie became an opera singer. The family's acting tradition was continued by Davenport: In 1893 he married the actress Alice Davenport (1864-1936), their daughter Dorothy Davenport (1895-1977) also became an actress. From 1913 until his death in 1923, Dorothy's husband (and thus Harry Davenport's son-in-law) was the silent film star Wallace Reid .

Alice and Harry Davenport's marriage was divorced in 1896. Only a little later he married the singer and actress Phyllis Rankin (1874–1934), who also came from a traditional family of actors. This marriage lasted until Rankin's death. Her three biological children, Ned Davenport, Ann Davenport, and Kate Davenport, and Harry's stepson Arthur Rankin all became actors. His grandsons Dirk Wayne Summers (* 1931) and Arthur Rankin Jr. (1924-2014) were also filmmakers in the film business. Through his marriage to Phyllis, Davenport was also brother-in-law of Lionel Barrymore , since he was married to Phyllis' sister Doris at the time. During his film career, Davenport, known as an antique lover, appeared time and again at the side of family members such as his brother-in-law Barrymore or - in Gone with the Wind - with his son and grandchild.

Theater career

As early as 1871, five-year-old Harry made his stage debut in the play Damon and Phytias as Damon's son. After growing out of children's roles and graduating from school, he learned his trade in the theater company of Frank M. Mayo, where he took part in plays by Shakespeare and Schiller . He then worked for four years at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco before turning to Broadway in New York: In the musical The Voyage of Suzette he made his Broadway debut there in 1894. By 1910 he appeared in various successful plays and earned the reputation of a respected actor. Pieces like The Belle of New York and The Rounders made him a household name by the turn of the century. He played mainly in musicals, but had a leading role in 1902 alongside Ethel Barrymore in the drama A Country Mouse . He also played alongside leading actresses such as Elsie Ferguson and Pauline Frederick in the early 20th century .

In 1913, Davenport and theater legend Eddie Foy were in charge of founding the Actor's Equity Association, which continues to this day. The aim was to protect Broadway actors from exploitation by greedy producers: the rehearsal times for plays, for example, were mostly not paid at the time, most actors had a seven-day week and you could terminate them without notice. Since Broadway producers hindered Davenport's further career in the theater, he turned to film: At the age of 43, he made his screen debut in 1914 in the silent film comedy Too Many Husbands and played in numerous silent films until 1921. In 1915 he was one of the Vitagraph star comedians in a series of short films about the Jarr family. Between 1915 and 1917 he also worked for this and other studios as a director of around 40 short and feature films. In 1919 the Actor's Equity Association struck the first stage actors' strike in US history, which ultimately resulted in the association getting most of its demands through. As a result, Davenport celebrated other Broadway successes with plays such as Lightnin (ran for three years from 1918 to 1921), Thank You (1921-1922) and Topaze (1930).

In the course of the Great Depression , from 1929 onwards, productions on Broadway also went increasingly bad. Harry Davenport and his wife received fewer role offers and at times sold self-picked strawberries for a living. In the early 1930s, Davenport occasionally tried again as a film actor, but only with moderate success.

The late film career

After the unexpected death of his wife Phyllis in 1934, Davenport decided to drive his car to Hollywood to re-enter the film business. He quickly rebuilt his reputation and became one of the most famous actors of his age. In supporting roles , Davenport now mostly played lovable grandfathers, compassionate doctors, wise judges or dignified figures of authority. At the end of the 1930s, he accomplished the feat of starring in three films in a row, each of which received the Oscar for the best film of the year: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Life Artist (1938) and, perhaps in his most famous role today , as Doctor Meade in Gone With the Wind (1939). At the time, Davenport's long acting career was so respected by his colleagues that the Gone with the Wind film crew gave him his own chair on the set. Even Bette Davis remembered that "everyone was happy of us when he was cast in one of our movies." While in the US, then life expectancy was around 60 years of the 70-year-old Davenport turned at least half a dozen films per Year. He justified this in an interview as follows:

“I hate to see men my age sit down and receive social support that believes their lives are over. An old man has to show that he has mastered his trade and is not a loaf. When he's done that, he can pocket his pension money and buy daisies for it. "

A well-known appearance by Davenport was his role as the aged King of France in William Dieterle's literary film The Hunchback of Notre Dame based on Victor Hugo 's novel of the same name. In Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Foreign Correspondent (1940) he played the editor-in-chief of a newspaper, in Sam Wood's drama Kings Row (1942) he impersonated a colonel and in William A. Wellman's Western Ritt zum Ox-Bow (1942) he opposed as a respectable citizen in vain against a lynch mob. He was often seen in eccentric and lovable roles, for example as a hermit of a ghost town in the comedy The Bride Came on Delivery (1941) alongside James Cagney and Bette Davis and as Judy Garland's lively grandfather in Vincente Minnelli's film musical Meet Me in St Louis (1944). In The Thin Man Returns Home , he portrayed the father of the detective Nick Charles played by William Powell in 1945. In the 1949 film drama The Fate of Irene Forsyte , he was seen as the father of Errol Flynn and Walter Pidgeon , where he was the late C. Aubrey Smith replaced. In some B-movies like the crime comedy Granny Get Your Gun (1940) next to May Robson or the drama The Enchanted Forest (1946) next to Edmund Lowe , Davenport, who is usually cast as a supporting actor, also played leading roles.

death

In August 1949, Harry Davenport suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 83 , just an hour after calling his agent Walter Herzbrun about a new role. His last film - the comedy Laugh and Cry with Me , in which he played a drunken butler - was not released until eight months after his death. A newspaper obituary boasted that he had the longest acting career in American history (from 1871 to 1949). He was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla near New York next to his wife Phyllis.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Commons : Harry Davenport  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harry Davenport: What A Character
  2. ↑ Article about Harry Davenport at the local history site Joycetice von Canton
  3. ↑ Alice Davenport in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  4. ↑ Dirk Wayne Summers in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  5. ^ Profile of Harry Davenport at Barrymore Family
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Ken Dennis: Harry Davenport: Grand old man of the Golden Age
  7. ↑ Harry Davenport, WHAT A CHARACTER! , Weblog (2013)
  8. ↑ Life Expectancy at Birth by Race and Sex, 1930-2010
  9. ^ Obituary for Harry Davenport
  10. ↑ cf. Release dates
  11. ^ Obituary for Harry Davenport
  12. ^ Harry Davenport in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved April 16, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Davenport, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davenport, Harold George Bryant
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Canton , Pennsylvania , United States
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1949
Place of death Los Angeles , California