Edwards Davis — Almost Great (1926) 🇺🇸

Edwards Davis has become almost great in a number of professions.

He has been minister, vaudeville headliner, broker, producer of stage plays, and star in legitimate productions. On the threshold of attainment, each time something snapped and he had to begin all over again.

A young Columbia graduate, he first attracted attention by the splendid delivery of his sermons from the pulpit of a California church. The doorway to ecclesiastical honors opened with the offer of the pastorship of a big church in Melbourne, Australia.

This he refused, “Because,” he says, “I felt that the force of religion was being lost. In the Dark Ages, the church was at its most influential stage. With mental awakening, came man’s dependence more upon himself and his contact with his fellow men. Hundreds of cults and societies sprang up which, in a cooperative spirit, served to replace the church’s effect.

“My study of history has shown me that each mode or standard ascends to its apex and then retrogrades, and it dawned upon me that the mental and individual stimulus of these many currents of thought were taking over the work formerly done by religion.

“The doctrines I preached were ahead of my time and considered revolutionary. Socrates was put to death because he saw a vision beyond those who judged him. Intolerance restricts progress. Many men have been ground into nothing, because they have let their imaginations be repressed into a small sphere.

“When I felt those walls closing in upon me, with their eternal convention and prescription of thought, I sought a wider latitude.”

For a quarter of a century, Davis played on the stage, never attaining the goal of his vision. A play he had written was to be produced by Al Woods but, as its theme was pacific and as the tide of public feeling about that time swerved toward a militaristic viewpoint, it was shelved.

He left the stage for Wall Street. For a time he prospered. Then, an unexpected break in the market swept away his holdings.

Sidney Olcott, an old friend, came to his rescue and gave him his first picture rôle, in “The Only Woman,” following it with another in Pola Negri’s The Charmer. Lately, he has played a character part in “Joanna.”

He is a cultured and thoughtful scholar of history and psychology and other subjects of interest to analytical thinkers, and talks equally well on science and astronomy or on politics and economics.

“I do not consider myself a failure,” he says, “though on the surface it might appear that I have not accomplished much. Youth visualizes, but seldom attains, lacking experience.

“So I feel that, in my ripe, mature years, I may accomplish things — accomplish them through the motion picture, which in time will fight its way through its present frivolities of entertainment to its real purpose as an educational factor in reflecting the fundamental principles of life and conduct.

“So I am glad that I am an actor now instead of a minister. I feel that I can do more good here than I did in my four years in clerical garb.”

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Photo by: Max Munn Autrey

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, October 1926