Frederic Hamen
actor, assistant_director
- Birth name:
- Fred Booth Hamer
- Born:
- 1873-09-18, Manchester, Lancashire, England, UK
- Died:
- 1953-12-30, Los Angeles, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, assistant_director
Biography
Manchester’s soot-grey streets delivered Frederic Hamen to the world on 18 September 1873, and from that industrial cradle he sprinted toward the flickering lights of silent cinema. Within two breathless decades he slipped in front of the camera as a sly leading man, then darted behind it as the calm hand keeping order on chaotic sets. Audiences caught his sideways grin in A Man and His Mate (1915), felt the voltage of his cliff-hanger instincts in The Great Radium Mystery (1919), and chased him through the spinning, melting shadows of The Flaming Disc (1920). Between takes he collected two marriages—first to vaudevillian spark Tootsie White, later to actress Jessie Frances Hamer—before the Pacific lured him west. Los Angeles finally claimed him on 30 December 1953, closing the book on a life that had already migrated from Lancashire fog to California sunbeam.
