Henry S. Koser

Biography

Born under a September sky in 1875, Henry S. Koser stepped before the cameras early enough to appear in Mistress Nell while the feature-length film was still a novelty. Four years later he tipped his hat to audiences in Good-Bye, Bill, and in 1919 he locked the door on The Mystery of the Yellow Room, sealing one of silent cinema’s earliest whodunits. The curtain fell for good on 10 November 1935, in Pennsylvania, the same state that had watched him grow from a fresh-faced American boy into a silver-screen presence now preserved only in flickers of nitrate.