M.W. Rale

Biography

A child of St. Petersburg’s icy springs, M.W. Rale first drew breath on 25 March 1877. Crossing continents and screens alike, he slipped into the flickering new world of cinema, haunting serials and melodramas as the enigmatic hero or velvet-voiced villain. Audiences of 1914 thrilled to his pursuit of clues in The Exploits of Elaine; the following year he traded espionage for heartbreak in Madame Butterfly, then leapt into newspaper romance with Beatrice Fairfax in 1916. Three and a half decades later, on 8 July 1940, the final curtain fell in Englewood, New Jersey, but the celluloid ghosts he left behind still move at twenty-four frames per second.