Ben Hall

Biography

A freckle-faced kid from Hoboken, Ben Hall stepped before the camera before he could shave, popping up in silents while other boys were still trading marbles. Born in 1899 to dockworker George Hall and Constance Fletcher, a Liverpool transplant, he darted through a few early shorts until the family relocated across the Hudson to Weehawken. In 1918 he traded spotlight for ledger books, counting cash in a Manhattan bank, but the ink smelled like exile; by 1920 he and his mother had chased the sunset to Los Angeles, brother George Jr. following westward. Studio backlots hired him first to lug props, yet the cameras remembered his face. Bit parts crept back—an office boy, a bellhop, a doughboy in the distance—until by 1926 the rent came from acting again. John Ford noticed the reliable mug, drafting Hall into an unofficial repertory: eight pictures across seventeen years, from the first talkies to post-war Technicolor. His seconds-long masterpiece arrived in 1946: the perfumed barber taming Henry Fonda’s Earp in *My Darling Clementine*, one smooth stroke of pomade immortalized. When the final slate clapped in 1949, Hall pocketed his makeup kit and simply walked away, living quietly another thirty-six years while the reels kept spinning without him.