George Cummings

Biography

George Cummings entered the world on Independence Day 1880 in Richmond, Virginia, and spent the next six decades turning that Southern spark into silver-screen electricity. Moviegoers first felt his punch as the slippery safecracker in *Alias Jimmy Valentine* (1915), then watched him trade handcuffs for high society secrets in *The Argyle Case* (1917), and finally caught him wielding a whip and a conscience in the 1924 racial-justice short *The Whipping Boss*. When the final reel of his life ran out on 11 March 1946, the curtain fell in Los Angeles County, California, closing the career of a man who had helped wire early Hollywood for drama.