Ford Sterling — A Contradictory Comedian (1926) 🇺🇸
He started his career as a boy clown in a circus, and now owns a villa near Nice. He won fame as a slapstick comedian, and is known throughout Europe as one of America's leading artistic photographers.
He was known to every kid in the land as a pie target, and is a fancier of German police dogs, Scotch terriers, and Persian cats.
He can dance a professional waltz clog, and is one of the most perfect hosts in Hollywood.
He looks like a German burlesque comedian, and speaks four languages.
He used to be captain of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops, and is a cartoonist, a painter, and a sculptor.
He cries on hearing sentimental songs, and is a polished drawing-room conversationalist.
He has been called by Harold Lloyd "the funniest man in movies," and he goes to England yearly to buy the clothes that earn him the title, "the best-dressed man in Hollywood."
He is "the greatest pantomimist on the screen" in the opinion of Allan Dwan and Malcolm St. Clair, and he studied to be a doctor.
He is Ford Sterling, now appearing in the best part of his career — the title role in the Paramount picture, "The Show Off," which Malcolm St. Clair directed.
"Ford Sterling, the composite human," he has been called. For, since the day when he ran away to join John Robinson's circus, he has accumulated as many interests as he has played roles. It is probably because his mind is alert and agile that he has been constantly learning, picking up miscellaneous knowledge here, on a Mississippi River show boat, and there, in his European travels. His is a myriad-sided nature.
It seems strange, perhaps, to the public that this comedian who, in the early days of the movies, was a "Keystone Kop" should be so different in real life. Unfortunately for the public's illusions, he is different — different in that his is not the slapstick mind nor character, though the native humor in him is always bubbling out, on the screen or off.
An example of this divergence between appearance and reality is his hobby — photography, that mixture of pure art and pure science. Many guests see the inside of his perfectly appointed Hollywood home. Few see his back yard, where stands a complete photographic studio and laboratory. Here, between pictures, Sterling concentrates on his prints, with multiple gums, bromoils, and bromoil transfers as his mediums. One hundred and forty of his prints are now exhibition in British salons, forty are in a one-man exhibition in France, and fifty are in Germany. His laboratory is cluttered with prizes and awards that his photographs have won.
His greatest study, after all, though not a conscious one always, is human nature. He knows the ways and mannerisms of men, he understands human emotions, and that is the basic reason, undoubtedly, why he has been able to "come back" so amazingly, after having sunk out of public notice with the dissolution of the Keystone constabulary.
He directed for a while after that disorganization, but it was not much to his liking. Then Malcolm St. Clair cast him in his first Paramount picture, "The Trouble With Wives," and the bit of pantomime he did in that is perhaps as great as any ever done on the screen. Roles in this new medium — polite sophisticated comedy — followed with equal success. Then in the picturization of George Kelly's play, The Show Off, he was cast in the title role.
Malcolm St. Clair is enthusiastic over his performance. Others in the cast — Lois Wilson, Louise Brooks, and Gregory Kelly — stood around to watch him troupe. Advance showings of the film indicate that Ford Sterling has come into his own with a smash.
Ford Sterling first won fame as a slapstick comedian, but in the world of art he is equally famous as an artistic photographer.
Sterling as he appears in the title role of The Show Off, his latest film.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, September 1926