Edward MacKay

Biography

Philadelphia welcomed Edward MacKay on 27 August 1874, and by the early 1910s he had traded city streets for klieg lights, shaping stories both in front of and behind the camera. Audiences of the silent era remember his touch in The Span of Life and The Coming Power (both 1914) and in the following year’s The Secret Orchard. Off-screen, he shared his life with two leading ladies—Alice C. Brown and, later, Eloise Elwood. His final curtain fell on 26 December 1948 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, closing a life lived in the flicker of early Hollywood.