Future Favorites — Ernest Truex (1938) 🇺🇸
Ernest Truex, pint-sized comedian who has starred in scores of New York and London stage productions, during the past 20 years, has quit the theatre...
He has signed a long-term contract with Samuel Goldwyn... and brought his wife, known on the stage as Mary Jane Barrett, and their three-year-old son, Barry, to settle permanently in Hollywood...
Truex’s first assignment under his new Goldwyn commitment is as Binguccio, the foot-sore stooge to Gary Cooper in The Adventures of Marco Polo... This isn’t Air. Truex’s first screen role — not by some twenty-four years... in July 1913, Truex, then 22 years old, played the leading role opposite Mary Pickford in A Good Little Devil... This was Miss Pickford’s first feature film, and it also was historic in another respect... it was the first feature production of the Famous Players Company, now known as Paramount... Truex and Miss Pickford had acted in The Good Little Devil on the New York stage for David Belasco...
Immediately after completing this first film, Truex and Miss Pickford did another picture, Caprice, together...
A few years later Truex acted in Vitagraph pictures with Shirley Mason, Louise Huff, Dorothy Kelly and other silent picture stars who were favorite of the generation now graying about the temple...
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, forty-six years ago, Truex got off to an amazing start as a thespian... Every actor’s secret ambition is to play Hamlet... Truex played Hamlet when he was five... In fact, between the ages of five and nine, Truex toured the Middle West billed as “The Boy Tragedian” ... He played Hamlet, Richard the III, Othello and other dramatic Shakespearean roles...
While Truex is forsaking the stage, his two sons are carrying on the family tradition. James is acting in Tovarich while Phillip is appearing ill Richard III...
Several years ago, when Truex headed the Whistling In the Dark troupe on a tour to the Pacific Coast, talking pictures got him for the first time... He acted in the film, Whistling in the Dark, and later appeared with Elissa Landi in The Warrior's Husband... He was not happy with the experience... “I was unknown to movie audiences, yet I was handed to them in starring roles,” he said... “I should have been passed out to them gradually, appearing in featured roles for a time until they became used to me”...
So Truex went back to the stage, to remain until the Goldwyn offer came along... Truex is the film’s tiniest adult featured player. He’s 5 feet 3 inches tall.
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1938
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