Eddie Phillips — A Rising Young Man (1924) 🇺🇸

Any number of svelte young men can generally be found in Hollywood, or for that matter, in any other center of youth and bandolined caprice, who might qualify for the rôle of city slickers in the movies.

They can part their hair in the middle with consuming grace, smooth back their locks around the temples, fling forth a callow, sallow smile and raise a surreptitious eyebrow, wear a flaring coat, broad trousers and variegated vest, and otherwise prove their suitability for the background of an extravaganza a la cabaret, as we know these from the screen.

But the chap who can be a part of and yet differentiate himself from this motley, mobby throng, and become a somebody really is the exception that taps home a whole new set of rules. The friends and admirers of Eddie Phillips assert that he is one of these exceptions who will soon be one of the incandescent favorites of the screen.

Some fans may have recollections of Phillips from the time he appeared in Mary Pickford’s production of “The Love Light.” He was the young Italian boy who became blind. That was his screen debut, and it was made under circumstances that reflect on his peculiar determination and ingenuity.

He posed as a real Italian, Eduardo Phillippo, when he went to get the job. The deception has become a famous one that is talked about even to this day. Phillips didn’t know enough about the Italian language to argue with a fruit vendor over the price of bananas, but he managed to cultivate an accent that enabled him to get halfway across the Continent from New York before he was finally found out. Even then he succeeded in convincing Miss Pickford that as long as his subterfuge, aided and abetted by a swarthy make-up, neatly applied, was so good, he was the right man for the part.

That is history now, and as the immediate aftermath was not particularly encouraging in jobs, Phillips has since forgotten all the Italian that he knew. Lately he has played light crooks, as in “Through the Dark,” and those smooth city fellers as in “The Nth Commandment,” both of which featured Colleen Moore.

“The Whipping Boss,” that is soon to be released, afforded him one of his first really sympathetic parts, and in “The Plunderer,” recently completed by Fox, he is also a healthy juvenile lead. So that, he feels, will go to shape his career more pleasantly and popularly. As a consequence, you may well watch for him and see whether you like him as well in these rôles as in “Flapper Wives,” where he appeared as’ a somewhat flip man about town opposite May Allison, and some of the other features mentioned. For his ambition, as it happens, is to do parts like that of Glenn Hunter’s in “West of the Water Tower.”

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Photo by: Walter Fredrick Seely (1886–1959)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1924