Harry Carey

Biography

Harry Carey’s story begins on a Bronx pier in 1878, the son of a magistrate who moonlighted as sewing-machine mogul. Instead of accepting a West Point cadetship, he chose New York Law School, trading parade grounds for lecture halls beside the future “Night Mayor,” Jimmy Walker. A capsized skiff and a bout of pneumonia later, Carey, flat on his back, hammered out a stage play, then barnstormed it for three lucrative years—until his next script flopped and left him busted. In 1911 Henry B. Walthall steered him onto a Biograph set where D. W. Griffith sized up the lanky easterner and promptly put him in front of a camera. Carey’s second trip to the altar—this time to actress Olive Fuller Golden—brought a bonus: her introductions to a cocky props man named Jack Ford. One lunch-hour pitch to Universal’s Carl Laemmle later, Ford was promoted to director and the most durable actor–auteur tandem of the silent West was forged, galloping together until a 1921 dust-up. Riding herd for Universal, Carey became the face that sold nickelodeon tickets to prairie and tenement alike, sometimes signing the scripts and call sheets as well as the posters. When talkies arrived he slid gracefully into grizzled wisdom, earning an Academy nod for gavel-swinging gravitas in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He reunited with Ford once more as the sympathetic doctor in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) and, twelve years later, shared the trail with teenage son Harry Carey Jr. in Howard Hawks’s Red River. Emphysema and cancer finally pulled him from the saddle in 1947. At the head of 3 Godfathers the following year, John Ford froze the dedication card: “To Harry Carey—Bright Star of the Early Western Sky.”