Freeman Wood — Persistence Wins (1925) 🇺🇸

A desire of several years’ duration is being gratified with the casting of Freeman Wood, identified with dress-suit roles, as a Western hero in a new Fox [William Fox] film.

Born to wealth and social prestige — the son of a wealthy real-estate broker of New York City — Wood was educated in private schools and was permitted to indulge his boyhood’s hobby of piloting a plane. The confession of his ambition to become an actor met with parental disapproval, but no amount of debating, nor even the gift of a Bleriot monoplane as a peace offering, could dissuade him.

Leaving Columbia, he sought — and failed to find — theatrical opportunity. So he took a position with an architectural firm, studied modeling at night school, and proved sufficiently capable at designing buildings and illustrating to keep the wolf from his door. However, his primary ambition was not lost sight of and eventually he was given his chance with a small stock company at Mount Vernon, New York.

After the war — he served in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps — he listened to his parents’ pleas and, instead of returning to the stage, went to work as a machinist at eighty cents an hour. His father’s pride that he was “beginning at the bottom and learning an honest trade” he could not share, and when a chuck on a large lathe slipped and. crushed his foot he decided that he would be artistic if he had to starve. Fortunately he obtained a role with Grace George in “The Ruined Lady,” carrying on a real-estate business as a side line. Several successful seasons on Broadway enabled him to give up trade altogether.

Deciding to try his luck in the movies, he went to Hollywood. It was a year before he landed a job. But he refused extra work, at one time going without food for four days.

Finally a director offered him a dress-suit role and in suave, debonair parts he continued — with Mae Murray, Betty Compson and other stars. Only now is his ambition to do more vital parts being gratified.

He is superbly confident. For six months he remained idle rather than lower his salary.

Another evidence of acute obstinacy is his choice of a roost for his home — the topmost peak of Lookout Mountain which soars above Laurel Canon. Because he is a clever chap, with a fund of humor, he has many friends who deplore its location but still trek up that winding, tortuous path to his home.

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Photo by: Roman Freulich

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1925