William Austin — A New Style of Comedian (1928) 🇺🇸

William Austin? Who is William Austin? Well, there isn’t a picturegoer who doesn’t know, if he will recall a few comedies like “It,” “Ritzy,” Swim Girl, Swim, Silk Stockings, and “Honeymoon Hate.”

Even if they haven’t all been funny comedies, Austin has always been amusing in them. His personality, his slender, rambling presence, his waxed mustache, his occasionally silly-ass manner, have stuck in the minds of fans.

Paramount thought so well of his talents that they gave him a longterm contract, and so he’ll probably gladden eyes for many months.

Austin’s struggle to get a foothold in pictures is a story of almost epic length. So far back does it go, that it is almost completely lost in the mists of the past.

Two or three times he almost succeeded. Once it looked as if he were sure to win, when he appeared as Belknap-Jackson, in Ruggles of Red Gap. Always, though, there were long weary waits between pictures. Then Elinor Glyn placed her official stamp of authority on his personality, in It and “Ritzy,” and the world was — nearly, anyway — his. Austin was born in British Guiana, South America, his father being the owner of a sugar plantation there. He was educated in England, and. for a time was in business in Shanghai. In school he had been interested in dramatics, and when he came to America, in about 1915, his liking for the theater was reawakened.

The first part that Austin ever played professionally was in Los Angeles. As soon as he came on the stage he got a laugh. The reaction that he produced was so hysterical that it continually upset the equilibrium of the other actors. Quite unintentionally he managed to steal nearly every scene.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1928