Hector Dion

Biography

Boston, 1881: the city’s gas-lit stages first welcomed the quicksilver talent of Hector Dion. Over the next four decades he shape-shifted between quill and curtain, scripting and starring in turn. In 1908 he strode across boards as Shakespeare’s doomed Moor; seven years later he chased a cursed jewel through the cliff-hanger serial The Crogmere Ruby; and in 1916 he returned to the Bard, this time trading Moor for monarch in a silver-screen King Lear. When the final curtain fell in 1943, it fell in the same state where his story began—Massachusetts—closing the loop on a life spent conjuring drama for audiences both live and celluloid.