Edward Sloman

Biography

A cockney kid who bolted from London’s East End at nineteen, Edward Sloman first made his name treading the fog-lit boards of British theatre, then leapt into vaudeville and, finally, the director’s chair. A backstage brawl with a powerful booker blacklisted him overnight across the U.K.; a leading-lady pal shoved a steamer ticket into his hand and pointed him west—Hollywood, 1915. At Universal he met Wilfred Lucas, talked himself into extra work at $7.50 a day, and kept the wolf from the door by churning out scenarios for twenty-five dollars each. One of those war yarns landed on the desk of Thomas H. Ince; the mogul’s cheque bought Sloman a seat behind the camera at Lubin Pictures. By Christmas 1915 he was calling the shots on his first one-reeler. When the studio demanded he also play the hero, he doubled as star and skipper until sheer fatigue sent him walking. Four years later independent producer Benjamin B. Hampton handed him the reins of the sprawling western *The Westerners* (1919); its box-office punch opened every door in town. Universal rehired him to make *His People* (1925), and the picture’s popularity locked him into a five-year contract. The crest of his silent fame came with *Surrender* (1927), a Cossack–Jewish-village tragedy starring Russian sensation Ivan Mozzhukhin. *The Foreign Legion* and *We Americans* (both 1928) kept the momentum humming, but the talkie revolution proved less kind. After one final fade-out in 1938, Sloman traded arc-lights for microphones, spending the rest of his life writing, producing and directing in the newborn world of radio.