Thomas Meighan

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Thomas Meighan (1922)

Thomas Meighan (born April 9, 1879 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † July 8, 1936 in Great Neck , New York ) was an American actor who made it very popular in the silent film era and was one of the highest-earning Hollywood stars.

life and career

Thomas Meighan was born in 1879 to a wealthy Pittsburgh family. He studied pharmacology at St. Mary's College for three years , but then decided to become an actor. He had his first theater engagement from 1896 in the acting company of Henrietta Crosman . Meighan quickly became successful and made it to Broadway in New York in 1900 . His role in The Dictator eventually brought the handsome actor to prominence and more plays followed. After making his film debut in 1911, Meighan turned more and more to film in the mid-1910s. There he played mostly solid, attractive men as a popular leading actor and was seen alongside Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson, among others.

Meighan and Swanson appeared together in the box office hits Conditions like Paradise (1919) and Errwege einer Ehe (1920), directed by Cecil B. DeMille . One of Meighan's most successful films, The Miracle Man from 1919, has been lost to this day. He was able to maintain his popularity in the 1920s, at times Meighan raked in around 10,000 US dollars a week. From 1924 to 1926 he served as president of The Lambs , a prestigious New York actor club. In 1928, Meighan played the lead role of a police officer in Lewis Milestone's crime film The Racket , which was nominated for the category Best Picture at the first Academy Awards in 1929 . When talkies meant a major upheaval for Hollywood in the late 1920s, Meighan, who was almost 50 years old, decided to largely withdraw from the film business and switch to real estate. He only occasionally took on film roles, most recently as the father of Jackie Cooper in the children's film Peck's Bad Boy from 1934.

Meighan also fell ill with cancer in 1934, from which he died two years later at the age of 57. The New York Times called him in its obituary a "movie star, one of the great darlings of silent film cinema". Thomas Meighan left behind his wife, Frances Ring, a stage actress to whom he had been married since 1909. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his film work .

Filmography (selection)

  • 1911: The Ne'er-Do-Well
  • 1915: The Fighting Hope
  • 1916: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
  • 1917: Her Better Self
  • 1918: Heart of the Wilds
  • 1918: The Forbidden City
  • 1919: The Miracle Man
  • 1919: Conditions Like Paradise (Male and Female)
  • 1920: aberrations of a marriage (Why Change Your Wife?)
  • 1920: Civilian Clothes
  • 1921: A Prince There Was
  • 1921: Conrad in Quest of His Youth
  • 1922: Women on the wrong track (Manslaughter)
  • 1923: The Ne'er-Do-Well
  • 1923: Homeward Bound
  • 1924: Pied Piper Malone
  • 1925: The Man Who Found Himself
  • 1926: The New Klondike
  • 1926: The Canadian
  • 1928: The Racket
  • 1928: The Mating Call
  • 1929: The Argyle Case
  • 1931: skyline
  • 1934: Peck's Bad Boy

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b THOMAS MEIGHAN, MOVIE ACTOR, THIS
personal data
SURNAME Meighan, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1936
Place of death Great Neck , New York