Henry B. Walthall — How I Became a Photoplayer (1916) 🇺🇸

In my early days I was literally hampered by dramatic instinct, human sympathy and emotional feeling. At first I overacted, rather, over-felt.

by Henry B. Walthall

My career on the speaking stage was more varied than lengthy. I went on the speaking stage in response to the “call” within me, that yearning which an artist feels to create. The “yearning” had taken hold of me years before.

I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do; it wasn’t music, it wasn’t writing, for I could not write, and art as a life work did not appeal to me. My father, a farmer in Shelby County, Alabama, told me it was law. I laughed, for I knew it wasn’t law.

However, I consented to follow my father’s desire, and took up the study of law. When I became interested in the study of law I thought better of it, but once “when I took the floor” and delivered a brief legal plea, I knew instantly it was the stage I wanted. The narrow confines of legal oratory, the hampering barrier of legal “etiquette” robbed me of that emotionalism which surged through me when I put my heart into what I said.

The Spanish-American war broke out about that time, and I ceased studying law and joined the army. When I returned from the South I did not go back to law school, but joined a stock company. I “trouped” through various sections of the country in a number of productions, climbing steadily as the months passed. And then I went into photoplay work. I had not contemplated making the jump. In fact, I had always looked on photoplay work as somewhat beneath me.

I was killing time in the Players’ Club in New York in the summer of 1906 when a producer friend of mine — a famous man now — came up to me and asked if I knew anything about Jim Kirkwood [James Kirkwood]. Kirkwood and I had been close friends, and so I told this producer that I would look him up. I spoke to his wife, and was informed, to my astonishment, that he had gone into “screen” work.

I immediately pitied him, feeling he was going down the road as a “has-been.” I sought him in his studio, and, determining to rescue him, rushed madly into the mercury-lighted room. There he was, standing over in the corner, in a prison scene, done up in not too glorifying convict stripes, borrowing a cigarette from the warden, while they waited for the camera man to finish talking with his wife, back in the office. Tears came to my eyes while I surveyed my old friend of the “legitimate” days. Too. bad, I thought, that he had come to this.

He only grinned when I tried to rescue him. While he was chuckling over my somewhat pathetic face, a somewhat tall, well-built man walked in with a smile on his face, and steel in his eye, David Wark Griffith! Kirkwood introduced me to him, and this director [D. W. Griffith] acknowledged the introduction by saying: “Get busy; I have been waiting for you for some time.”

“For me?” I laughed, wonderingly.

“For your type — get busy. You’re a convict now. Upstairs you will find a convict suit. You’ll be digging sewers outside the prison walls in about fifteen minutes.”

“But I don’t want to join the movies!” I said.

“You will after you try it once,” he laughed.

“And I did, I guess, for I stuck. While I began as a sewer-digger I was quickly put into better parts, and I wonder now how I ever could have scoffed at the movies.

My climb into big parts was not sensational, yet it was steady. I was practical about my work, made a severe study of it, and scientifically sought to improve it, and to fit myself into a definite type of films where I could acquire individuality, and feel that at last I have reached my goal.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, June 1916
(The Photo-Play Journal for June, 1916)