Duncan McRae

Biography

London, 1881: the curtain rose on Duncan McRae, a restless force who would swap the stage’s footlights for the flicker of early film. Within a decade he was shaping stories behind the camera, marshalling armies of silent-era players through My Own United States (1918), the shadowy power struggle of The Usurper (1919), and the high-stakes world of Money (1921). Off-set he shared his life with leading-lady Gertrude McCoy. The final fade-out came in the same city that first greeted him, 4 February 1931, closing the reel on a career that helped steer British cinema from its infancy toward something enduring.