Robert Paton Gibbs

Biography

In 1860, the coal-heavy air of Scranton, Pennsylvania, greeted the first breath of Robert Paton Gibbs. By the new century he had traded the soot for klieg lights, stepping before cameras to embody shipwrecked loners, jungled laborers, and the last tremors of a doomed dynasty in The Jungle (1914), Robinson Crusoe (1916), and The Fall of the Romanoffs (1917). His final curtain fell on 22 February 1941, this time under the quieter skies of Staten Island, New York.