Donald Crisp
Donald Crisp was ‘a player’ in Hollywood long a lifetime before the movie of the same name. Director, producer, actor and behind-the-scenes powerbroker - it’s certain that the movie industry would have looked very different without his input. But his extraordinary life in front of and behind the camera tell only half the story - it was a remarkable enough tale, though augmented by a few creative movie business twists.
George William Crisp was born in Bow on 27 July, 1882. A humble enough beginning, he was one of four boys and four girls born to James and Elizabeth. His later Hollywood biogs claimed that he had attended both Eton College and the University of Oxford. The latter is unlikely, the former pure fiction, though it would have added an faux-authentic Englishness; by the time Crisp became an established actor he had acquired cultured upper-crust tones, though would slip as easily into a Welsh or Scottish accent. For the record, the official Eton archivist denies Crisp was ever at the school, observing that a career at England’s premier public school ’seemed to go down quite well in early Hollywood!’
Certainly George did serve in the Second Boer War, around 1900, enlisting as a trooper in the 10th Hussars. It was in South Africa that he encountered a young Winston Churchill. George returned to London, but like so many decided that his fortune lay abroad. Borrowing the fare from his brother-in-law James Needham, he headed for the USA in 1906. On the boat to America, Crisp’s singing voice caught the ear of opera impresario John C Fisher, who signed him up to his company. Tours of the United States and Cuba followed, and this taste of the bright lights decided him to try his luck in the theatre.
He worked first as a stage manager for George M Cohan. Playwright, composer, singer, dancer, director and producer, the multi-talented Irishman was known as ‘the man who owned Broadway’ in the years before World War I. It was on Broadway in 1910 that Crisp met DW Griffith. Griffith would become a legendary director in early Hollywood - at that time he was just an actor looking to break into the new medium of motion pictures. Griffith told Crisp that he was heading to Hollywood to get involved, and his new friend elected to go along.
Crisp found himself in the right place at the right time. Hollywood was a production line, churning out quick, cheap features, and with a desperate need for manpower. Over the next 20 years George (the soon to be Donald) would direct dozens of movies and appear in around 100 more. Most were bit parts, but Crisp would play Ulysses S Grant in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. And in Broken Blossoms, he returned (at least within the movie) to the East End. In the Limehouse melodrama he played Battling Burrows, the brutal father of Lillian Gish’s character.
Remarkably, Crisp returned to London to sign up again during the First World War, working in army intelligence. He would also enlist during World War II, at the age of 60, rising to the rank of Colonel in the US Army Reserve.
While the talkies finished the careers of many from the silent days of Hollywood, for Crisp it meant a renaissance. Wearied by directing hundreds of features he switched exclusively to acting in the thirties. An imposingly handsome man in late middle age, with cultured English tones, he became a popular character player, sometimes the villain, sometimes the good guy, but invariably in supporting roles. You’ll see Crisp alongside Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights and Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty. Perhaps his best role, and one for which he won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, was How Green Was My Valley, in 1941.
Crisp’s remarkably diverse career put him in a unique position in the Hollywood of the forties and after. He had been in since the beginning, before the major studios existed, and had a network of contacts from his work on the business and production side, as well as from his days in the military. He became an advisor to the Bank of America, which was to finance many of the movies of this era, giving the nod to projects. A major player, he now grew rich and invested heavily in property. But he never stopped acting, working into his eighties. His first screen role was in The French Maid, in 1908; his last would be in the 1963 movie Spencer’s Mountain, with Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara (on which TV’s The Walton’s would later be based). he died in Hollywood in 1974, aged 91, and is buried in the final resting place of so many Hollywood stars, the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.