Douglas MacLean — Biographical Sketch (1927) 🇺🇸

Douglas MacLean, Paramount star, tried a little bit of several things before he decided eventually on the acting profession as a career. Well educated, he was qualified for almost any line of endeavor, particularly with a personality such as his. He thought he would make a good salesman, after he graduated from the Northwestern University Preparatory School and the Lewis Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Completing his course in the science of industrial arts, he promptly got himself a job as an automobile salesman, but there was not enough action in that for him, so he took up newspaper reporting. There he got the desired action, but little else save experience. Bond selling followed his newspaper career and he met with considerable success, but the acting bee was always under his bonnet, so he enrolled in the famous American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and the stage and screen has been his profession ever since.

Upon his graduation from the dramatic school his work attracted the attention of Maude Adams, who engaged him to play opposite her in Rosalind, a stage fantasy. Following that engagement he gained some invaluable experience in stock. He was in stock for a year in Pittsfield, Mass., and another year with the Oliver Morosco company in Los Angeles. From there he just naturally drifted into pictures, his screen debut being opposite Alice Brady.

A little later D. W. Griffith selected him for a leading role in a war picture, which was followed by two successive leading roles opposite Mary Pickford. The late Thomas H. Ince elevated him to stardom and he has held his place in the front ranks ever since. His first vehicle as a star was in the tremendously popular “Twenty-Three and One-Half Hours’ Leave.”

He followed that first one with such photoplays as: “The Jail Bird,” “Passing Thru’,” “Bell Boy 13,” “The Hottentot,” “Going Up,” “The Yankee Consul,” “Never Say Die,” and “Introduce Me.” By that time he was such a reigning sensation he was signed to release his picture through Paramount. For that company he has made such successes as “Seven Keys to Baldplate,” “That’s My Baby,” Hold That Lion, “Let It Rain,” and “Soft Cushions.”

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Douglas MacLean

in

• Seven Keys to Baldpate
• That’s My Baby
• Hold That Lion
• Let it Rain
• Soft Cushions

Distributed by Paramount

Collection: Motion Picture News, October 1927 (Booking Guide and Studio Directory)