Earle Williams — How I Became a Photoplayer (1916) 🇺🇸
My coming to the motion pictures was not filled with any great desires or high hopes, and I might better tell of my earlier experiences on the stage, so that you may appreciate these two points.
by Earle Williams
My uncle, James Paget, who appeared with Maude Adams and many other notables of the yesteryears of the theatre, was the chief inspiration for my ambitions to go before the footlights, but he also was aware of the rigors which beset the trooper and in a measure therefore was a hindrance to my earliest histrionic endeavors.
Going the way of the youth without a goal, therefore, after passing through the High School of San Francisco, whence my parents had moved from Sacramento, where I was born, and after a course in the Polytechnic College of Oakland, I set about various tasks as a means of maintaining the dignity of labor and incidentally proving my right to three square meals a day. Then I was as daring as a man with a wrist watch and a plaid suit, and so I tried my hand at photography, clerking in a hardware store, as head usher in the McDonough theatre, Oakland, and last but not least, as a portrait salesman. I played a few small bits with touring companies stopping for the night at the theatre in Oakland, but it was not until I went on a trip to New Orleans in search of employment, arriving with only twenty dollars in my pocket, that I landed upon the boards as a regular performer. I tried to get employment at hard labor in several stores, but all to no avail, so. with some of my childhood ambition to become an actor still aflame. I hied myself to the theatre, where I pried open a jom in Siberia, with the Baldwin-Melville Stock Company. That was indeed a notable event in my life, but it marked only the first step along I lie steep and rugged pathway to success.
If anybody is obsessed with the idea that becoming a star is “falling in soft,” as they say, you can be certain that I know he is harboring a delusion, for with me it was all uphill work, and if it were not for the love of the calling, for the very fascination of the struggle, I should have quit long ago. In stock and repertoire one-night stand and vaudeville I have “hit” the hay, and the cornhusks as well, I have traveled in pullmans, day coaches and combination cars, I have enjoyed all the sweets and the sorrows of road and stage, and only the joy of achievement makes me satisfied with the seemingly wild adventure.
There were days upon days that I seriously considered the waiter whose hand was always within reach of a ham bone as the ultimate of human contentment; not because I was unable to buy food, because with many quick changes of scenery, I scarcely had time to eat a square meal. One-night stands even now loom up in my imagination as a huge nightmare of toil and train-catching, and a multitude of tribulations.
But the whole experience, even while I was passing through it, had this one redeeming feature. In stock, vaudeville and one-night stands, I went from one greater and better part to another, until I was sure that I was headed somehow for the goal of genuine success, which, as that gifted heir to the eloquence of Elbert Hubbard, James W. Beckman, says, “is based upon the solid foundations of many failures and hardships.”
After memorable engagements with Rose Stahl, in The Chorus Lady, and Helen Ware, in The Third Degree, while laying off, in New York, during one summer vacation, following a trip on the vaudeville circuits in The Sign of the Rose, I decided to try the motion pictures as a means of filling in the long wait for the next theatrical season. Armed with a letter from the Packard Theatrical Exchange to a director of the Vitagraph, I sallied forth rather indifferently to the Brooklyn studio of the company, but was soon so engrossed in the novelty of performing before the camera, that what I first intended as a sort of makeshift engagement, became to me a most alluring life profession. I have had many offers to return to the so-called legitimate stage, but nothing now, it seems, will ever divorce me from the Photoplay. To the kindness of Mr. Albert E. Smith, Mr. William T. Rock, and Commodore J. Stuart Blackton I owe gratitude for fine encouragement and great opportunities, and in return, for the past six years, I have given the public, through the Vitagraph, the very best that is in me.
My first appearance on the screen was in “The Thumb Print,” playing the part of Jack Plympton, with Harry Morey as Abe Case and Helen Gardner as the lead. Morey was the heavy, and the plot of the piece revolved around his villainous interception of letters between the hero and heroine, and finally she, thinking Plympton had forgotten her, married Case, who was conveniently killed later by an Italian, whom he had cheated earlier in the game. Of course the play had a happy reunion of the real sweethearts, and this completed a rather interesting story. Since, I have appeared in hundreds of splendid productions, but feel that my best characterization was that of John Storm, in “The Christian,” for which I obtained a whole raft of flattering compliments. I have had other fine successes, of course, and take particular pleasure in playing opposite Anita Stewart, Edith Storey, or with Lillian Tucker, who is now playing with me in a corking big serial [Editor’s Note: Probably The Scarlet Runner (1916)].
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, May 1916
(The Photo-Play Journal for May, 1916)