Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Memories of a Film Pioneer (1951) 🇬🇧

Cecil M. Hepworth — A Film Pioneer: The Dawn comes to Flicker Alley

Still a familiar figure in Wardour Street, Mr. Cecil Hepworth is a pioneer of British Cinema. In his autobiography he has a fascinating story to tell.

by Cecil M. Hepworth

They were simpler, sunnier days. Hepworth began in the ‘showmanship’ period in the late ‘nineties, carrying his forty-second films to lecture-halls all over the country, where frenzied audiences demanded their repetition many times at a sitting. From the ‘fairground’ period he helped nurse the cinema to the time of the great Hepworth Company at its Walton-on-Thames studios.

To those studios came famous stage actors, men of mark in many fields, anxious to try the new medium. In those studios many ‘stars’ of yesterday made world-wide reputations: Alma Taylor, Chrissie White, Gerald Ames, Ronald Colman, Violet Hopson, Stewart Rome, names remembered with deep affection four decades later. From Walton-on-Thames films were dispatched in quantity to the world, even to the United States before the Hollywood era.

Conditions, if not primitive, were rudimentary in the earlier days; the grandiose notions of the industry today were undreamt of; and, most marvellous of all, leading actors and actresses played for as little as half a guinea a day (including fares), and were not averse to doing sorting, filing and running errands in their spare time.

—

Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue