M. Charles DeRoche (1923) 🇺🇸

You have probably heard of Monsieur Charles DeRoche already. If not, you soon will. And there’s a treat in store for you.

by Adela Rogers St. Johns

Because, besides being distinctly good to look upon and having all sorts of fascinations, this young Frenchman is an actor.

Charles De Roche [Charles de Rochefort] is the French actor-athlete-war-hero imported by Paramount to fill the vacancy left in their ranks by the abdication of one Rodolph Valentino [Rudolph Valentino].

Naturally, everybody heard this and giggled.

The whole industry was trying to find a successor to Rudy. It was the favorite indoor sport of Hollywood and New York. Not to mention numerous young barbers throughout the nation who suggested themselves for the place.

Now it is an absurd and impossible thing to fill anyone’s shoes — that is, when those shoes have fitted a particular public idol.

Paramount lost a large fortune trying to produce another Mary Pickford.

But it is undoubtedly true that the death of Wallace Reid, the abrupt departure into outer darkness of Rudy Valentino at the height of his popularity, the long screen absence of Bill Hart [William S. Hart], have left an aching void somewhere at the top of the movie constellation.

We need new idols to worship, that is all.

Monsieur De Roche is the choice of the people who made Wallace Reid and, largely, Rodolph Valentino. He has been given some superb parts to play — some of the really great acting parts of the year, such as the Hindoo in Pola Negri’s “The Cheat,” the Pharaoh in Cecil De Mille’s [Cecil B. DeMille] Ten Commandments, and the Faun in William de Mille’s [William C. de Mille] “The Marriage Maker.”

Naturally, I was tremendously interested to see what this young man had to offer. What distinctive appeal he could give.

It’s very simple.

Do you remember when you were sixteen and you curled up on the sofa and ate chocolates and read all sorts of exciting and romantic tales? When you lived in all sorts of beautiful worlds, out of story books?

You were — maybe you are — too young to accept the bald realism of the day. You refused sophistication and disillusionment and ennui — at least, in your favorite novels.

In those days, you fell in love with the dashing hero of every book you read. The young American battling in far lands to save the throne of a Princess. The gallant knight setting forth with his lady’s scarf upon his helmet. The ragged rhymster aspiring to be King of France.

Do you remember?

I do.

Well, Charles De Roche is that hero.

He is Monsieur Beaucaire.

He is Francois Villon.

He is Charles Brandon and the Scarlet Pimpernel.

There is picturesqueness about him. There is romance.

He seems to me to combine that clean, wholesome strength that was Wallace Reid’s, with the continental allure of Valentino.

He has the physique which we love to think is typically American — the broad shoulders, the slim waist, the light, graceful movements.

But his manners, his smiles, his conversation are all wholly European.

He is very far from the ancient but generally accepted concept of the small, dark Frenchman with the moustache and the excitability. He is blond, his eyes are hazel, he is big — oh, very big indeed. He is clean-shaven.

In fact, he is distinctly the type that Georges Carpentier succeeded in making so popular a couple of years ago.

And there is a romantic novel, too, in the story of Monsieur le Count de Rochefort, of the Faubourg St. Germain and Hollywood.

The title is an old and authentic one, but Monsieur Charles De Roche has long since abandoned it.

He was born in France. At the advanced age of one month — “I do not remember, it is true, but my mother have tell me,” he said with his swift smile — he went to Monoca to live. His father was president of the French line, the greatest of French steamship companies.

For the first twelve years of his life, the boy lived amid the picturesque sunshine of Algiers. He knew the desert, the sun, the sea, and he loved them. He was raised rather like a young Arab chieftain. Everything about him was full of color, full of romance, full of warmth and battle.

But when he was twelve, they took him back to Paris, to begin his education as a French gentleman.

It was all planned. When his father died, he would take over the affairs of the family. He would be a business man.

“And from the time I am ten years old I want to be an actor,” he told me, with swift intensity. “Why — I do not know. Nobody is actor in my family. Nobody even know actor. I have seen only — oh, maybe two, three actors. But when I am ten I make all my little friends to sit still in a chair and I — I am actor for them.”

He tried, to please his mother, a business career for a short time.

It was no good. The call of the stage was in his blood.

At last there was a terrible scene in the home of the de Rocheforts.

“If you follow such a career as that,” said his lady mother, “I will never see you again. You shall never cross my threshold.”

He wept. He pleaded. She was adamant. He went, heartbroken yet determined.

“She have kep’ that promise, oh yes,” he said soberly, “I have not seen her for sixteen year. She live now somewhere in Corsica. I do not know how where — anything. I am very sorry. For myself, I have give up much money — two million, maybe more. I don’t care.” The smile came back. “The money you make yourself is more fun to spend. Besides, my mother have therefore give away all my money to the poor people and the priests and the church. So that is good. Maybe, it will get me some day into heaven. She spent it much better, no doubt, than if I had it.”

Well, he left home and he went on the stage.

In a small, cheap theater, where the little audience hissed and shrieked bravos, and expressed their feelings by throwing carrots and cabbages.

It was his desire to be a tragedian.

But there were lean days, oh, very lean. He lived in a garret. He ate what and where he could. He went through many experiences.

He was with a circus as a trapeze performer and acrobat. “How you call it — the man who jump from one rope to another high up in the air? Well, I am him. Oh, I was a strong young fellow.”

Later he rose to vaudeville. “Yes, I am a song and dancer. Once, too, I am on the same bill at the Folies Bergère with a young man, also most unknown, whose name it is Charlie Chaplin. You have heard of him, maybe?”

At this time he won considerable fame and prestige in France as an athlete. He is still considered one of their greatest football heroes.

Then came the war.

For the first few months he was in the very thick of it.

He was at the battle of the Marne. He was at Somme.

Mostly, it was mud and water and cold. But — “It was all right,” he said, “I get along fine. Too well. Once, a big English writer, he come to the trench where we are. He looked at me and say: ‘What is this? All your soldier mad? They find it amusing then to live in the mud and have a hole shot under them like it is a house? They have an idea to laugh at that, eh? But — it is to laugh or to cry. And I was too big then to cry.”

Shortly after that he was captured and spent twenty months in a German prison.

“The first thirteen months — they are not so bad. I have something to eat. But the last seven. Mon Dieu. They are terrible. I have a room as big —” he looked about for a comparative — “as big as this table where we eat lunch. Not one little bit of the light of the sun or electricity she can come in there. I have no — no — what you put over you when you sleep” — I told him — “yes, the blankets. I have no blankets. And no fire and outside she is twenty-six below the zero. Once every day they give to me a piece of bread — oh, not such a big piece of bread she is either, made out of straw and I do not know what. And a little bit of water. Once, every fourteen days, I get me some food that they allow in a parcel because it come from neutral country — America. And while I eat that, German guard he walk up and down behind me, up and down, and clump his boots and whack his gun. It is not a good way to eat. Your stomach jump.”

Finally, he escaped by feigning insanity — a very difficult and dangerous piece of acting in itself.

A commission came from Switzerland, and, after observation, declared him insane. He was released and returned to Lausanne.

“Then I have one devil of a time to make them know I am not crazy — oh, much worse than to make them think I was. Oh, that was happy time. The happiest time in all my life. To be free. To walk on the street when you want. That was a sensation.”

After the war, he went back to the stage. He had considerable success in the big Parisian theaters. He was with Sarah Bernhardt for a brief engagement before she went into pictures in France.

“And then they say will you come to America, and I say I will come, and here I am and I expect to stay — as long as you will let me.”

He has none of the bored sophistication that is so marked a characteristic of our actors.

He is like a child about some things. He is not afraid to talk about the war. nor his part in it. It was a great game to him. He is all enthusiasm. And he has a delicious and flashing sense of humor. It behooves you, in conversation, to watch your step, or you will find that he is laughing at you, with friendly amusement.

He loves the studio, its atmosphere and its people. He has a five weeks’ vacation before he starts the Apache picture with Negri, and he proposes to spend it watching Bill Hart make “Wild Bill Hickok.” Bill Hart, by the way, is his favorite actor and his hero. He is immensely ambitious and quite frank about it.

And he has very high ideals of acting. It will be interesting to see his progress with movie fans. It will be interesting to see if they appreciate his characterizations. He has had no chance yet to play a “straight part.”

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Charles De Roche as the stern and all-powerful Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1923

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Charles de Roche

Certainly after seeing The Ten Commandments we would fail editorially if we did not give Charles de Roche conspicuous mention. As the selfish and cruel Pharaoh he left nothing to be desired. In itself, this performance eradicates the stain which blurred his name when he was hailed as Valentino’s successor. Now Mr. de Roche is playing opposite the temperamental and fiery Pola Paris”

Photo by: Donald Biddle Keyes (1894–1974)

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, May 1924