Claude Gillingwater — A Movie Homesteader (1924) 🇺🇸
What is it drives stage actors from the spoken to the silent drama? I have asked some half hundred of them and do you know what forty-nine of them have replied?
by Margaret Ettinger
Not the lure of the lucre as you and I may have surmised. No, the desire to have a home! Theodore Roberts has told me so and Tully Marshall, and whether you believe it or not that bad man of the screen, Ernest Torrence, wanted a real home too. Claude Gillingwater, one of the more recent recruits, gave practically the same reply.
“I scoffed at pictures,” he told me, as we drove from the Warner Brothers studios where he was working in Tiger Rose to his home in Beverly Hills.
“While playing in Three Wise Fools in Los Angeles, Mary Pickford approached me and offered me the part of the Earl in Little Lord Fauntleroy. I actually rejected the engagement. It had taken me some forty years to reach the feature class on the stage. I thought it would be folly to desert the footlights. I had been advised so strenuously against it, the strongest argument being that I would never get any one to pay real money to see me on the stage when they could see me on the screen for twenty-five and fifty cents.”
“But a great argument for my trying pictures was put up by my young son. He had been ill and for two winters he and his mother had sojourned in California. When I played the Coast they made the trip with me. Time came for me to go East once more. It meant leaving the wife and boy. All went well until our farewells at the depot. Little Claude had been urging me to accept Miss Pickford’s offer. At the station when good-byes were being said he threw his arms about my neck and said ‘Every boy has a father, but me.’ That hurt a lot and made the parting doubly hard. When I reached Salt Lake City and found a wire from Miss Pickford asking me to reconsider her offer, I did, and accepted immediately without consulting any one. My manager said I was hopeless — that he would never handle me again.”
So Claude Gillingwater came into pictures!
By the time he had told me that much we had reached his home in Beverly Hills and the most ardent stage fan couldn’t blame him for reconsidering. A perfect picture it is. A little gray bungalow set in among tropical trees and flowers.
Claude Gillingwater’s second picture engagement almost cost us one of the screen’s best character actors. The director who had engaged him for a part was one of the five best known in the business. He had gone over the original script and found the role assigned him a corking one.
In his own words: “I started on salary at four thirty that afternoon. It was three weeks later before I received my first call. The scene was in a bank, at night. I did not remember that particular bit in the story and asked the director about it. He told me he had discarded the script I had read. Also another one that had been written in the interim and at that moment he was ‘shooting from his head.’ It was my first experience with anything of the sort and what a novel one it was! I was told to open the safe and deposit a package in it. I asked if I were well acquainted with the safe; did I know the combination or should I fuss with it. I had better go right ahead and open it I was told, else it might take too much footage. Then I wanted to know if I were a highwayman; a gentleman crook or president of the bank. The director didn’t know. I should just go ahead and play it as I chose and he would see that it fitted in all right. The entire picture was made in that fashion, and I had no idea from beginning to end what I was doing, or what the production was all about. Neither had any one else. I was ready to give up the silent drama. I was sure I didn’t and couldn’t understand it. But my interest was more aroused and I determined to learn more of the intricacies of the business after I saw the completed picture in the projection room. To my amazement it proved a very pleasing production, with continuity that ran along without a jerk. I have learned since that only a genius director could have done such a thing.”
Personally I thought Mr. Gillingwater attained his greatest picture triumph as Steptoe in “The Dust Flower.” His portrayal of the kind-hearted old butler was so human, so true to type that it won’t soon leave the memory of those who saw it.
In the two years that he has been making movies he has played in “My Boy,” “Remembrance,” “Fools First,” The Christian, “The Stranger’s Banquet,” “A Crinoline Romance,” “Alice Adams,” “Jewel,” Three Wise Fools, Dulcy, Tiger Rose, and “Daddies.”
He is miles tall — way over the six-foot mark and he has a pair of the kindest eyes I have ever seen. His voice shows the years of training before the public.
I wish a little gray home in the West would appeal to more Claude Gillingwaters.
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Claude Gillingwater came from the stage and consented to do just one picture with Mary Pickford, but the prospect of having a real home at last has kept him in the movies.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1924