Carlyle Blackwell

Biography

Carlyle Blackwell slipped onto the screen in 1910 as a brooding slave owner in Vitagraph’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and never looked back; audiences instantly crowned the sleek, dark-eyed New Yorker their favorite daydream. Within four years he had traded shorts for features, and by 1915 Kalem was billing him as its brightest marquee magnet—until Jesse L. Lasky lured him west to Famous Players. A six-year sprint of polished romances followed, but 1921 found Blackwell restless; he sailed for London on what was meant to be a brief tour and instead rewrote the rest of his life. Britain embraced him: he drew first blood as the gentleman sleuth Bulldog Drummond in 1922, then donned Tudor velvet as Lord Robert Dudley opposite Alice Joyce in The Virgin Queen (1923), both continental smash hits. His velvety silence remained golden until talkies arrived, and with them the curtain. Yet he still claimed one last laurel: in 1929 he marshaled an Anglo-Dutch-German ensemble to become the final wordless Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, closing the silent era with a lingering, enigmatic smile.