Henri Étiévant

Biography

A spring baby of 1870, Henri Étiévant first drew breath in Paris on 13 March. Within decades he had swapped the city’s cobblestones for flickering silver, acting his way through early film history and later calling the shots from the director’s chair. Audiences remember his imprint on *Siren of the Tropics* (1927), the serial sweep of *Mysteries of Paris* (1912), and the tilt at Cervantes in *Don Quichotte* (1913). The curtain fell for the last time on 9 August 1953, again in Paris, the same streets that once launched him.