Chester Withey
actor, director, writer
- Born:
- 1887-11-08, Park City, Utah, USA
- Died:
- 1939-10-06, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, director, writer
Biography
On a gray February afternoon in 1937, Chet Withey—storyteller, sometime-actor, and one of early Hollywood’s quiet innovators—left a Santa Monica streetcar and walked straight into the path of a speeding automobile. Newspapers that night filed grim bulletins; few expected him to last the week. Whether the injuries he sustained that day quietly sealed his fate nineteen months later remains a mystery no obituary has ever solved. He had been born to Chester H. and Mary E. Withey in Park City, Utah, then a raucous silver-boom camp perched 7,000 feet up in the Wasatch Range, thirty-two miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The elder Withey earned his living amid the roar and dust of the local mills. While movies were still learning to talk, Chet was already inside the young business, coaxing performances from two of its brightest comets—Norma and Constance Talmadge—directing the sisters through some of their first flickers of fame.
