Joseph Depew — Peter Pan, Perhaps (1924) 🇺🇸

Peter Pan, you remember, was the boy who never grew up, but the boy who may play Peter on the screen was quite grown up at the age of eight. He had by that time chosen a profession and succeeded in it and he even belonged to the union, which Peter would never have done even in this practical world.

The little boy is Joseph Depew, who is the child casting directors in the East usually send for whenever there is a boy part that demands finesse and any considerable dramatic talent. When he was only four years old he went on the stage, and by the time he was eight he was a member of the Actors’ Equity, knew the best booking agents on Broadway, the quickest route to the Fort Lee studios, several dramatic recitations, how to make an audience sniffle and weep, and how to put over vaudeville gags. And he was learning to spell.

The spelling lessons weren’t much fun. Neither was history, geography, arithmetic or composition — all of which were given to him in large doses when the theatrical managers and motion-picture directors didn’t need him. Kindly, gushing ladies who thought little boys should be happier going to school and having their afternoons free to romp and play were horrified at Joe’s announcement that he hated to get back to work, when a theatrical engagement closed and school confronted him again. But even at that tender age Joe had learned that it was more effective to turn his melting brown eyes on women than to argue with them.

Now, at eleven, Joe has slid out of going to school very often by almost always being busy at the studio. Not that he doesn’t have to do his lessons. There is a law requiring that. But Joe finds it much more pleasant to do his lessons in a dressing room at the studio with the chance that he may any minute be called away to play with Valentino [Rudolph Valentino], Bebe Daniels, or Lois Wilson.

Not that he is upstage toward the neighbor boys who haven’t his advantages. Just a short time ago, after seven weeks spent working in “Icebound” and Monsieur Beaucaire, at the studio, Joe made the rounds after school one afternoon with a friend of his who delivers groceries. The boy persuaded Joe to help pull up the heavy dumb waiters in the apartments where he delivered and at the end of two or three hours gave him fifty cents. It looked like a lot of money to Joe, because it was something you could spend on candy and marbles and tops. At the studio they pay you checks — three hundred a week it has been lately and they say soon it is going to be a great deal more — but a check is just a slip of paper that you put in the bank.

Joe has three highly prized possessions; a letter from Kate Douglas Wiggin saying that in “Timothy’s Quest,” he was all and more than the author hoped for, a review of “The Steadfast Heart,” from the New York Tribune in which Harriette Underhill said he ran away with the whole show, and an autographed picture of William S. Hart and Pinto Ben. His particular idol is Sidney Olcott. Other directors can criticize him but if Mr. Olcott calls him down he simply breaks down and cries. And the affection isn’t all on Joe’s side either, for Sidney Olcott has already decided that if he is the lucky director chosen to make Peter Pan, Joseph will play Peter.

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Photo by: Apeda

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924