Monte Blue

Biography

Gerard Monte Blue arrived on January 11, 1887—his mother’s ink on the orphanage form says so, though calendars later tried to shave off three years. A Midwestern winter baby, he lost his railroad-man father at eight and, with one suitcase and a younger brother in tow, moved into the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans’ Home. Between classes the boy slammed into football scrimmages, forging the muscle that would earn him paychecks as a miner, cowboy, circus trick-rider, logger, fire-tender and finally as an anonymous pair of shoulders hauling props for D. W. Griffith’s Biograph lot in Hollywood. Griffith liked the look of the strapping laborer and bumped him from scenery-shifter to stuntman to face in the crowd of *The Birth of a Nation* (1915). A year later Blue was assistant-directing on *Intolerance* while sneaking into frame for a blink-and-miss cameo. Support roles for Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille stacked up until he seized the spotlight as the fiery Danton in *Orphans of the Storm* (1921), trading barricade speeches with Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Audiences took notice; casting offices matched him with silent-era royalty—Gloria Swanson’s leading lover, Clara Bow’s rugged hero, Norma Shearer’s stalwart heart-throb. Sound came; his crisp diction sailed through microphones while Wall Street crumbled beneath his bankbook. The Crash of ’29 wiped out the fortune he’d stacked, yet the cameras still rolled. Warner Bros. and DeMille kept him busy through the thirties and forties—sometimes with billing, sometimes without—until the days of romantic leads surrendered to gray-haired walk-ons. His last gig took him on the road, pounding stakes and hanging posters ahead of the Hamid-Morton Circus. In 1963, influenza tightened its grip and a heart already tired from decades of adventure gave out in Milwaukee.