James Bradbury Sr.

Biography

On the same calendar day he entered the world—12 October 1857—James Bradbury Sr. first drew breath amid the pine-scented air of Old Town, Maine. Eight decades later, to the day, he exhaled his last in Clifton, New York. Between those two autumns he built a stage-and-screen career that flickered from the desert passions of The Garden of Allah (1916) to the stomping tap battles of Hot Heels (1927) and, finally, to the stately gravitas of Abraham Lincoln (1930). Off-camera he shared his life with two leading ladies: actress Florence May Saunders and, later, Ruth Torbett.