Lewis Stone — “Just a Good Actor” (1922) 🇺🇸
When I went over to the Metro studio the other day to interview Lew, he eyed me suspiciously and said, “What did you come clear over here to interview me for? Can’t you see it’s raining? You already know everything there is to know about me and if you tell it all I will probably land in jail. You never came over here in this rain just to interview me. You’re going to play some darn joke on me and get me to say the wrong thing about something. I know. Well, I won’t.”
by Mary Winship
I was righteously indignant. I almost decided to take him at his word and write about his past. But I found I couldn’t.
I have since attributed his lack of ease and courtesy to the fact that the Metro tailor — being of an economically inclined race, anyway, and having heard that the studio was going to close for three months on account of hard times besides — had made the pants of his dress uniform much, much too tight.
You know that can handicap a man’s style considerable.
If he wanted to sit down, he had to lower himself into a chair without moving any portion of his anatomy between his collar button and his shoes laces.
The fact that he was supposed to battle to the death in that economical garment, added to his mental unrest.
We were on the gorgeous drawing set designed for Rex Ingram’s forthcoming production, The Prisoner of Zenda. Lew Stone [Lewis Stone] is the hero — the dual hero of the romantic young Englishman and the equally romantic King Rudolf.
But as he walked up and down before me, his usually free and dashing stride was hobbled, as it were, by the mistakes and misapprehensions of that tailor. Lew Stone is a very charming chap. But he also has a disposition.
In fact, I’ve never known anyone in the world who reminded me so much of the little girl in the rhyme — you know the one:
When she was good, she was very, very good
But when she was bud — she was T. N. T.
Lew is one of those people, you know. I have never understood in the twelve years I’ve known him, how anyone so charming and entertaining could be so contrary and satirical.
I have known Lew Stone since the days of the old Belasco Theater, in Los Angeles, where Lew was a very young, very talented and very handsome leading man.
He and his first wife, a clever young actress named Margaret Langham, who is now dead, had a charming home in the exclusive residential section, where used to gather a distinguished set of budding theatrical and literary geniuses. Marjorie Rambeau, Richard Bennett, Bessie Barriscale, Dorothy Bernard, Harry Mestayer and, even on occasion, Laurette Taylor and her husband, Hartley Manners, to name a few.
Lew Stone is a cultured gentleman, and conceded by all critics and managers to be one of our best actors.
New York still remembers him in Behind the Lines and The Bird of Paradise. New York told him he was a fool when he forsook the stage and returned to California, which he adores, to enjoy his home and make pictures.
He is now married to Laura Oakley, a beautiful young actress, who was once his leading woman.
Lew has been on the stage since he was a boy.
His real ambition in life was to be a soldier. He ran away from home to enlist in the Spanish-American war.
When he asked me so impertinently why I came to interview him — it’s terrible interviewing people you’ve known all your life — I told him frankly that as a motion picture actor he was an unknown quantity and we’d have to forget the past and begin all over again.
He laughed. And when Lew actually laughs, his eyes light up so that they warm the very cockles of your heart — whatever those may be. His eyes are the most alive things I have ever seen. And even though his hair has a few distinguished threads of gray — the youngest eyes I have ever seen.
“I’m not a motion picture actor,” he said. “I’m just an actor trying to act in motion pictures. I do my best, but — it’s hard sledding.”
But Rex Ingram tells me that as the dual hero of The Prisoner of Zenda he is superb.
“No other actor on the screen could have done it so well,” he told me. “He is marvelous. His acting, his carriage, his appearance — well, he is the complete return of the romantic, daring, young hero we always love so well.”
I saw Lew Stone play Rudolf in The Prisoner of Zenda on the stage.
If he is anything on the screen like he was then, some of these pert young matinee idols of the screen — yes, even Wally Reid [Wallace Reid] and Rodolf Valentino [Rudolph Valentino], will have to look to their laurels.
He was lured from the stage to do pictures a few times in the old days — his first was as Bessie Barriscale’s leading man — and recently he made “Beau Revel” for Ince [Thomas H. Ince] and “Nomads of the North” for First National.
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Lewis Stone has made romance — good, old-fashioned romance — live again on the screen. He is not a sudden success as a leading man; he has had years of training on the stage and in the films to enable him to portray the famous dual role of Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf in The Prisoner of Zenda, the picturization by Rex Ingram of Anthony Hope’s popular novel and play. To the right, a scene from the picture, with Stone and Alice Terry (Mrs. Ingram) who plays the lovely heroine, Princess Flaria
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What is the matter with pictures?
There has been a noticeable diminution of attendance in the thousands of motion picture theaters throughout the United States during the past year.
What is the answer?
- Is it the continued high admission charges?
- Are exhibitors overdoing the vaudeville and orchestral features?
- Is the public losing interest in the personalities of the screen?
- Is it because of the failure of producers to provide consistently good pictures?
- Is the public wearying of this form of entertainment?
- Is it because of unemployment?
- Is it due to the over-exploitation of pictures?
There is some fundamental reason.
The Editor of Photoplay wants to hear the voice of the two million readers of this magazine.
$100 for letters
To the person writing the most intelligent and convincing letter on this subject (within two hundred words) a check for $50 will be mailed.
For the second best letter — $20.
For the three next best — $10 apiece.
Think this problem over and sit down today or tomorrow and write me your opinion.
James R. Quirk, Editor
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Dream Sheet
by Margaret E. Sangster
The little dreams, the childhood dreams,
The dreams that never were;
The dreams that touch the edge of tears,
That make the pulses stir.
The dreams that I have laid away,
The dreams that are to be:
They flicker from the silver sheet,
Into the heart of me!
The tiny homes where I have dwelt,
The paths that go untrod;
The struggles that my soul has known,
When just to live was hard!
The brave adventures I have missed,
The thrills that passed me by;
They flicker from the silver sheet,
Before my eager eye…
The longings and the vain regrets,
The heart throbs and the tears —
The happiness, the tender joys,
The ache of lonely years,
The romance, and the call of life,
And all that is to be —
They flicker, from the sheet of dreams,
Into the heart of me!
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, June 1922