Walter Long (actor)

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Walter Long (1924)
Walter Long in the Exhibitors Herald (1920)

Walter Huntley Long (born March 5, 1879 in Nashua , New Hampshire , † July 4, 1952 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American actor who played particularly often grim villains.

Life

Long began his film career with the New York film company Biograph , where he made his first film appearance in 1910 in David Wark Griffith's The Fugitive . Until the mid-1910s he played numerous supporting roles, also regularly directed by Griffith. Because of his grim appearance, he specialized in rogue roles at an early age. He played his best-known role in the silent film era in Blackface : In Griffith's controversial civil war epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), he took on the role of the African-American soldier Gus, because of whose sexual harassment a white woman throws herself to her death. In the 1920s he continued his career as a supporting actor in mostly exotic or rogue roles, for example in The Sheikh alongside Rudolph Valentino .

With the start of talkies in the late 1920s, Long's roles became increasingly smaller. He embodied larger parts in five films with Laurel and Hardy , for example as the gang boss in Hinter Schloss und Riegel (1931) or as the rough ship's captain in The Live Ghost (1934). In total, Walter Long played in over 200 films between 1910 and 1945, and in the years before his death he also took on minor television roles. Walter Long was married to actress Luray Roble until she died of the Spanish flu in 1918 at the age of 28. In the two world wars he was hired as a homeguard. He died of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of 73 .

Filmography (selection)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Long, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Long, Walter Huntley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Nashua , New Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1952
Place of death Los Angeles , California