Robert Harron

Biography

Robert Harron’s name once lit up marquees; now it flickers only in the footnotes of film history, yet every frame he left behind still crackles. The ninth child of an Irish immigrant clan squeezed into a Lower East Side tenement, he traded schoolyards for sidewalks, hustling odd jobs until, at thirteen, he slipped through the doors of American Biograph on East 14th Street. A messenger’s cap sat awkwardly on his dark hair, but the camera loved the face beneath it, and D. W. Griffith noticed the same week the director walked in. Griffith’s stock company became Bobby’s conservatory. Still in his mid-teens, he played lovesick farm boys, wide-eyed soldiers, and trembling bridegrooms opposite Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish, though he was already worldlier than any of them. Between 1915 and 1919 he moved through The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, An Old Fashioned Young Man, Hearts of the World, A Romance of Happy Valley, and True Heart Susie like a comet that refused to burn out. By the summer of 1920 he was plotting independence—scripts, backers, his own shingle—until a pistol discharged in a Manhattan hotel room on September 5. The bullet pierced his left lung; the coroner called it accidental, whispers called it heartbreak. The next night Way Down East premiered without him, its lead role newly entrusted to Richard Barthelmess. Bobby died three days later, twenty-seven birthdays behind him. The tragedy doubled back on itself: younger sister Tessie had succumbed to the Spanish flu two years earlier at twenty-two, and baby brother Johnnie would follow in 1939, felled by spinal meningitis at thirty-five. All three Harrons share a single, uncredited heartbeat in the battle scenes of Hearts of the World, a ghostly family reunion preserved in silver nitrate.