Bert Haldane

Biography

A Lancashire lad who first saw daylight in Warrington, 1867, Bert Haldane swapped the hum of Cheshire cotton mills for the flicker of celluloid and never looked back. Between 1912 and 1920 he steered the camera through the gas-lit alleys of The Rogues of London, let The Grip of Iron squeeze audiences white-knuckled in 1920, and earlier, in 1912, framed Her Sacrifice with a tenderness that belied the era’s brass-and-shadow technology. Off-set he shared his life—and presumably his scripts—with actress Maisie Thornton. The final curtain fell for him on 8 February 1937, in a quiet Ealing street, London, leaving the projectors of early British cinema still spinning his stories.