Edward Coxen

Biography

On 8 August 1880, a first-born squalled in the upstairs room of the Carpenter Arms, 18 Darwin Street, Southwark—Albert Edward Coxen, soon to answer only to “Bertie.” Two years later, the toddler crossed the Atlantic on the SS St. Louis with his pub-keeping parents, chasing an uncle who had already pitched a tent in San Francisco. By ten, Bertie was a city kid on Filbert Street, sketch-book in hand, while his father and uncle etched woodblocks for Coxen Bros. In 1896 the family sailed back to London so Sarah could nurse her dying sister; the boy, restless for classrooms and California sunshine, booked third-class passage west again in July 1897, sharing steerage with Scandinavian farmers and Jewish tailors and guarding a $125 stake. He stepped onto Ellis Island the day before turning seventeen, caught the train to the Pacific, and by 1900 had swapped his British passport for U.S. citizenship. Berkeley gave him a degree but not a calling. He tried engraving desks, gold pans, and surveyor’s chains before the Majestic Theatre in San Francisco let him speak verse aloud. Three months later the earth ripped open on 18 April 1906; the curtain fell, the fires rose, and Coxen ferried across the bay to Oakland stages. When the smoke cleared, the whole clan drifted south to a quiet suburb called Hollywood. He shaved “Albert” from the playbill, styled himself Edward—or simply Eddie—and in December 1909 bowed on Broadway in A Little Brother of the Rich. Twenty-seven performances convinced him that movies, not footlights, were the future. Kalem’s new Santa Monica lot hired him early in 1911; within a year he was in Santa Barbara riding for the Flying A, cranking out thirty-four one-reelers in 1912 alone. Fan magazines drooled: “A good-looking, virile young man, a manly lover, thoroughly at home on horseback.” Audiences cheered The Ghost of the Hacienda, Crooks and Credulous, and the serial trail of The Trail of the Lost Chord—often opposite the sparkling Winifred Greenwood. On 7 August 1915 his portrait landed on the cover of Pictures and The Picturegoer. Between takes he wed Edith Borella, petite Swiss-Californian bit-player, in 1914; they settled first in an anonymous Los Angeles precinct, later in the Coxen family house at 646 N. Manhattan Place. No children arrived, only film after film—more than 150 in all. Stardom, however, proved elastic. By the twenties the leads slipped away; Coxen’s narrow eyes and angular jaw found steadier work as the crooked gambler or the crooked sheriff in B-westerns opposite Ken Maynard, or as comic foil to Buster Keaton. Walk-ons and dress-extra days carried him through the thirties and forties, the camera glancing past him almost without recognition. He died quietly at home on 21 November 1954, aged seventy-four, and rests under a Forest Lawn stone that misdates his birth yet remembers him as “Beloved Husband and Brother.” Between the first curtain at the Majestic and the last silent bit-part, Edward Coxen gave the world more than 150 chances to sit in the dark and dream.