Born Today March 12: House Peters Sr.

1880-1967

Lon Chaney Sr. was not the only actor to be known by a nickname that included "a thousand;" British born Robert House Peters (Sr.) was known to movie audiences in the 1920's as "The Star of a Thousand Emotions." Peters was born on this day in Bristol, England and made his way to the States via the live stage (after a stint in the military and mining in South Africa).  He made his film debut in the Famous Players 1913 production In the Bishop's Carriage, co-directed by former Edison men J. Searle Dawly and Edwin S. Porter; it was also an early Mary Pickford feature. His next major role came in The Port of Doom later in 1913; directed by Dawley, Peters appeared opposite Laura Sawyer whom he had previously acted in two small Dawley shorts. He remained under Dawley's direction until mid-1914, finally making a feature not directed by him in late 1914. Salomy Jane (November 1914) was Peters' first western and was co-directed by Lucius Henderson and William Nigh. It also marked his move to the California Motion Picture Company (which was distributed by World Film).  In the next year and a half, he appeared in Jesse L. Lasky Feature Plays productions. While there, he had lead roles in several films starring Blanche Sweet; several directed by Cecil B. DeMille. And, it was a DeMille directed film that made a star of Peters in 1915, and it too was a western. The Girl of the Golden West starred Mabel van Buren and Theodore Roberts, with Peters in the top supporting role; based on a popular David Belasco play, Peters garnered the most glowing reviews.   By 1916, he was a headliner; his face was famous enough to feature on film posters nationwide. Such was the case with The Hand of Peril (March 1916), a Maurice Tourneur directed crime drama. It also was in Tourneur films in which he headlined for his three film roles for Paragon studios in Fort Lee. He alternated between dramas/melodramas and the ever popular western for the rest of the 1910's. He started the new decade out with a turn in a criminal rehabilitation drama that was made under Maurice Tourneur's new production company; The Great Redeemer (October 1920) had a sparse cast and featured religious fantasy elements, but Peters was still the headliner. In the 1920's his roles were almost exclusively in dramas of various sorts, and he was nearly always that the very top of the bill. In 1926, he briefly returned to the western genre in The Combat, but retirement was right around the corner for him and it turned out to be his final silent western. Peter's made just two more silent films; one in 1926, and the final film of his regular career in 1928. Peters finished his career in the supporting role of Rose-Marie a drama of romantic competition starring the young up-and-coming, and ultimately tragic, James Murray and a an even younger ingenue by the name of Joan Crawford. His career had a sharp peak in the early 1920's and a sharp decline to supporting roles, this prompted his retiring after after Rose-Marie. Peters may have retired in 1928, but was persuaded, in part by his actor son House Peters Jr. (who was, by the way, the original "Mr. Clean") to make an appearance in the Gene Autry western The Old West in 1952; the film was ironically directed by George Archainbaud, who was a director who himself started his career in the teens. His last acting gig came in his only television appearance in the religious based series This is the Life in a 1961 episode 'Song in the Night' aired on the 23rd of April on ABC.  He lived in Los Angeles for the remainder of his life, passing away there on the 7th of December 1967 at the age of 87. His cremated remains are reportedly interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

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Born Today December 22: Lucien Hubbard

Lucien Hubbard on left, with William A. Wellman and John Monk Saunders 

1888-1971

Screenwriter, producer and occasional director Lucien Hubbard was born on this day in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.  Hubbard started his professional career out as a writer; working as a night editor of the New York Times in the 1910's, while writing screenplays in the time he had to himself.  Despite that some sources cite 1923 as the year his professional career in Hollywood was launched, he actually landed on the west coast years prior to this, probably in 1916 (maybe earlier).  The first scenario that he wrote that was made into a film actually came in 1917 with The Angel Factory, a tenement drama made by Asta Film.  In fact, by 1923 many, many scenarios that he penned had been filmed.  It was around the year 1923 that he career as a Hollywood producer did indeed take off; his first production credit came as the supervising producer on Wanderer Of The Wasteland (1924); based on a Zane Grey novel the film was made at Paramount and filmed on location at Death Valley and in Nevada.  This did not keep him from writing however--he wrote and sold several screen plays in 1925 and a couple in 1926. He returned to production work on the huge project that was William A. Wellman's Wings (1927) [see the photo above], but his work on the film went uncredited.  His work as a producer on the Victor Fleming film The Rough Riders, also from 1927, did not go uncredited, but his work as a script doctor on the project did.  He was hired as an upper level executive at Paramount  after the release of Wings.  In 1928 and 1929 he was hired on as a director (had worked as director on at least 3 films, but was only openly credited with just two).  The first of these film was Rose-Marie which he adapted from a play and made at MGM and starred Joan Crawford. The second was The Mysterious Island, which he adapted from a Jules Verne novel, starred Lionel Barrymore and had a silent version and a partial sound version (it was also shot in the start of the art color process of the time and incorporated film work by Maurice Tourneur and Benjamin Chirstensen). His work as a producer on the partial silent The Wolf Song starring Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez cemented his work as a producer in the 1930's.  He was a very active producer during that decade, and along with his studio work, this was his most prolific decade in the business.  He was lured to MGM in 1933 and this resulted in legal action by Paramount due to Hubbard's contract as an assistant to Darryl Zanuck--the whole affair ended with Zanuck absconding to Twentieth Century Fox; and it would be that studio and Zanuck that Hubbard to turn to in the later days of his work as a producer.  The last film that he has a production credit on is as an associate producer on the 1941 comedy For Beauty's Sake.  Through all of this, he had never stopped writing.  During the silent years, among the many writing credits that he amassed, one has become a bit of a stand out on cultural grounds.  He has been given sole credit in some places (or blame depending on how you view the matter) wrongly for writing the script from scratch (which is just strange) for The Vanishing American (1925), when in fact, he adapted it from another Zane Grey novel (the film/book was remade 1955 with one shared actor and sported a very different plot).  His writing during the 1930's consisted of doctoring a number of scripts that needed work--for these he mostly didn't get credit, and probably, given his executive positions, didn't want credit.  The last film that he wrote came when he penned the script for Gung Ho!: The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders which was based on a true memoir; the film starred Randolph Scott and featured Noah Berry Jr., son of Noah Berry who would appear in several Paramount films that Hubbard penned in the 1920's.  Hubbard passed away in 1971 on the 31st of December, just days after his 83rd birthday, having lived the rest of his life on the property that he purchased in the 1920's in Beverly Hills.  As of this writing, there is no information as where he was interred.  

1919 film that was based on one of his stories (co-penned with W.A.S. Douglas) which distributed by Pathe.

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