Donald Gallaher

Biography

A brassy Illinois morning in 1895 first drew breath to Donald Gallaher, though within four years the boy had swapped Quincy’s quiet for the Grand Opera House in Chicago, bowing to footlights while most kids were still learning to read. In the audience one night sat Charles Frohman, Broadway’s star-making wizard; by curtain-fall he had inked the youngster into a contract that crowned him New York’s best-paid child performer and shipped mother Grace and her prodigy east to Manhattan’s electric whirl. There the roles stacked up—he swaggered through A Royal Family and, in 1910, slipped inside the skin of O. Henry’s reformed safecracker for the smash Alias Jimmy Valentine. Between plays he darted in front of Edwin S. Porter’s hand-cranked camera, becoming one of the fleeting faces in cinema’s milestone short, The Great Train Robbery (1903). Adolescence only widened his spotlight: he traded lines with Helen Hayes, earned a blush from Ethel Barrymore, and matched Theda Bara’s vamp stare for stare. When celluloid called again, Thanhouser cast him as dashing leading man (c. 1914) before Alla Nazimova lured him to emote across from her in Eye for Eye (1918). He soon swapped marquee for money-men shoes, shepherding the 1925 Broadway smash The Gorilla, then trekked west to Fox’s newborn soundstages, guiding Mae Clarke and cowboy-politico Rex Bell through early talkies. One of those titles, Temple Tower (1930), survives today—rescued from nitrate oblivion among UCLA’s cherished 250. The Depression found him back in New York, associate-managing the Federal Theater Project’s stages, but California tugged once more. He returned to saddle up in budget westerns, polish Bing Crosby’s banter at Paramount, and, in 1942, share a darkened set with Tracy and Hepburn in George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame.