David Powell — More About the Handsome Welshman (1919) 🇺🇸

He looks like an Englishman en profile — but when he turns to you and smiles, you are sure he must be French. As a matter of fact he is neither, but Welsh. He was born in Scotland of Welsh parents; and until he was seven and his family moved to this country, he’d never spoken and seldom heard anything but Welsh.

by Frances Denton

“I can remember,” said David Powell, as we waited upon the will of director Chet Withey [Chester Withey], in the New York Famous Players studio, “when I was a tiny shaver and they took me to the crystal Palace. I was awed into silence for a few minutes — then I began to prattle and ask questions. Two women standing near spoke: ‘What fine French that little boy is talking!’ As a matter of fact, Welsh is not at all like French.”

He twisted his mustaches. They are pointed, like the Frenchman’s in musical comedy. There is a certain psychology about Mr. Powell’s mustache.

“Of course, a mustache makes a man look like a villain. No matter how many good kind things I do in pictures, small boys will always point at me and say, ‘He’s bad.’ I have been bad — but lately, well, I expiated all my screen sins in “The Firing Line” when I ended my futile life that Irene Castle and Vernon Steele might be happy. And in The Teeth of the Tiger that I’m doing now I am a merry French Robin Hood — we had to change the story because he killed seven men in the original version and Withey said it would begin to be funny after the fourth murder.”

He lives in New York — a splendid sort of existence he has, too. He is not a furiously energetic man; he has a continental laziness which manifests itself in slow speech and a slow smile that begins in his eyes and spreads to the tips of his mustaches. He likes to work, once he is at it. but he does not believe in making a great fuss about it.

“l liked The Firing Line because I wasn’t in very much of it and I had such a corking time down in Florida between scenes. You know?”

Right now— or when I talked with him— he was having his troubles. His troubles: one burly Irishman whom he calls his trainer. He hired him to come every morning at seven o’clock sharp and give him a massage and put him through a lot of exercises.

“And — he comes.” said Powell worriedly, “that’s the sad part of it — he always comes.”

Every once in a while he does something like that. Just as he answers his fan letters: “I get so many after a successful picture I read them all and pick out the most interesting and answer those myself, in long hand. I don’t have a secretary — that’s rot. Someone told me I shouldn’t answer them myself because it will look as though I don’t get many. What do you” think?”

He has a delightful apartment in Manhattan and so many friends that he never gets lonesome. He has books and likes good ones and collects first editions. Another hobby of his is photography, but I don’t believe he has much time to practice it. David Powell is one of these perfectly useless persons — from an interviewer’s standpoint. He is much too busy living and working to have cultivated any idiosyncrasies that you can write about.

—

Above we see Mr. Powell and the only bust he has known since July 1. A little south-by-south-east, a pair of studies proving that he swings a mean look.

Mr. Powell, director Chet Withey, and that perfectly adorable child, Marguerite Courtot, all in The Teeth of the Tiger.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1919