Snitz Edwards

Biography

Snitz Edwards—born Edward Neumann in Hungary—stepped off a trans-Atlantic steamer with nothing but a knack for comic timing and a name nobody could pronounce. By 1889 he had a wife, a marriage license, and, soon after, a divorce decree. In 1906 he traded solitude for a Boston actress, Eleanor Taylor, who was two decades younger and twice as bold; together they spun a household of daughters into a miniature vaudeville troupe. Cricket arrived the same year as the wedding, Evelyn in 1914, Marian in 1917; before the girls could spell “contract,” Universal had them all on payroll, cranking out two-reel domestic farces that showcased the real-life clan as a theatrical family. Dad’s weekly take: five grand at a time when that could buy a beach house in Santa Monica. Cricket eventually ditched the spotlight for a typewriter at the Jaffe Agency, married razor-sharp L.A. lawyer Newt Kendall, then stormed the producer’s chair on The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. Marian stayed in front of the camera long enough to catch the eye of novelist-screenwriter Irwin Shaw—later the voice behind Rich Man, Poor Man—before swapping vows with him. Evelyn preferred ink to greasepaint and spent decades crafting stories in the RKO writers’ building. Edwards’ last turn came in 1931 as “Miller” in The Public Enemy, but cirrhosis and rheumatoid arthritis tag-teamed him before director William Wellman could call “cut.” Bed-bound in the house he once filled with laughter, he died quietly in 1937, leaving behind a family whose footprints—celluloid, pulp, and legal briefs—stretched clear across Hollywood history.