Born Today January 23: Holbrook Blinn

1872-1928

Holbrook Blinn, born on this day in San Francisco, was more a man of the stage than of the moving picture, but before his untimely death, he did make more than 25 appearances in films. Blinn's mother was a well known stage actress of her time and she brought Holbrook on the stage at the age of at least 6 or 7. He apparently travelled with her and appeared in "high" theatrical works across the U.S. and across the Atlantic in London as a child actor.  By the time he reached his twenties, he was a fixture on both Broadway and in the West End. He is listed in several publications as one of the finest live actors of his time. He was also an accomplished theater director as well.  He did not make his film debut however until he was in his forties.  He is known for sure to have taken top billing in the 1915 picture The Boss, directed by Emile Chautard and based on an Edward Sheldon play. The film was produced by the William A. Brady Picture Plays, and he and Brady must have not only known each other from the theater, but must have also been friends (they are also both buried in the famous--possibly infamous--cemetery of Sleepy Hollow). [Note: there is a possibility that Blinn appeared in the Maurice Tourneur directed The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England in 1914.] For a stage actor/director, Blinn was surprisingly prolific in motion pictures between the year 1915 and 1919. His appearance is the 1920's were fewer and further between, with a notable absence of any appearances between late 1919 and late 1923, when he turned up in a Mary Pickford film called Rosita--a romantic comedy mostly directed by the great Ersnt Lubitsch.  From that point on, he only made eight more film appearances, several of them with Marion Davis. Notable amongst the films are the following: The Bad Man (1923) in which stars as a Mexican in a western--certainly playing against type, Yolanda (1924) and Janice Meredith (1924).  His last film appearance came in the big city melodrama The Telephone Girl directed by Herbert Brenon, in which he took top billing opposite Madge Bellamy and released at the end of March. Quiet well off, Blinn owned a small country home/estate called Journey's End in Croton-on-Hudson, New York (located in Westchester county). One afternoon while vacationing there, he was thrown from the horse that he was riding. The fall did not kill him, and, in fact, he appeared to be recuperating well, until a secondary infection set in and caused respiratory failure on the 24th of June. Blinn was 56 years of age. As mentioned above, he was interred locally at Sleepy Hollow (formerly Tarrytown cemetery) with a large colonnaded marker that reads "Journey's End."  Blinn's life as a well-to-do stage actor was not free of controversy. In 1919, he was caught on the wrong side of a nasty strike on Broadway by actors who were attempting to form an union.  Blinn served as president for the so-called "Actor's Fidelity League" loyal to powerful Broadway producers. In the end, they all failed and the union Actors Equity was born.  This turbulant time on Broadway most likely accounts for his absence in film in the early 1920's--as the the two events over lap.

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