Edward Earle — An Actor Must Have Faith (1925) 🇺🇸

The first year in Hollywood generally riddles an actor’s enthusiasm. Not so, Edward Earle.

His optimism is boundless, and he firmly believes that, whereas fame and fortune have come to actors like Percy Marmont and others only after many delays, so they will similarly shine upon him in due course of time.

Earle is no newcomer, of course. He has been in pictures for a full decade, and in the early days at Edison was associated with Viola Dana and Shirley Mason; later at Vitagraph with Alice Joyce, Agnes Ayres, Corinne Griffith, and others. With Miss Ayres he made the series of O. Henry stories.

Conditions have changed so greatly in pictures in the past few years, however, that some of the most’ successful actors of a few seasons ago have had to begin all over again to win a place in to-day’s spotlight. Earle is among these, and he has made up his mind that the quickest way is to keep working from picture to picture as they come, free lancing, and watching for the right kind of part to play for all it is worth, hoping that one will come along that will bring him to the attention of the more prominent directors.

“The thing is for them to see you on the screen,” he said recently in Hollywood. “I have a wide personal acquaintance here, and many of the best directors have promised me an opportunity as soon as a suitable rôle comes along. But I know well enough that what really counts is a performance, and nothing else.”

He could go on the stage, where he once was well established as a leading man, but he won’t do that.

“I had enough of tours and one-night stands; there’s a lot of glamour even about the New York engagements that don’t exist,” he said. “I’d much rather have a home, and as I have moved all my worldly goods to the Coast, I intend to stay indefinitely.”

And having made that decision, he probably will.

—

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1925