Richard Neill — The All-Around Man (1917) 🇺🇸

“Dick” Neill wasn’t born to be an actor. He grew to be as big and shambling, as blunt-jawed and square-browed as “Abe” Lincoln. And he’s downright homely in the bargain.

by Peter Wade

“You’ll never make an actor,” his best friend said confidently, and big Dick’s [Richard Neill] feelings were hurt.

But his ambition wasn’t dampened. He gained a place on the stage, then shouldered himself into a niche in the Edison Company, and in the bygone days of matinée idols — of prettily posing leading men — his niche grew dustier and narrower.

“Dick” plodded on in his number twelve boots. “Surely,” he opined, “my day will come.” It has. He is one of the busiest men in pictures. The day of the natural actor has dawned — the man whose homely face and awkward hands tell more of life, its sorrows and its sins, than the sleek poseur of the artificial past.

“Dick’s” appearances are legion — he’s the original all-around man. Edison, Biograph, Kalem, Fox, Mirror and Metro — reads like a catalog; “Dick” has been everything from juvenile to leading old man.

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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1917