Wallace MacDonald

Biography

Born the fifth of May 1891 in the salt-sprayed fishing town of Mulgrave, Nova Scotia, Wallace MacDonald first tasted sawdust and greasepaint on traveling stages, then stepped before cameras so early in Hollywood’s youth that the medium itself was still learning to speak. Between 1920 and 1951 he juggled two careers: in front of the lens he romanced, schemed and occasionally wore a fez in silent-era comedies like Are All Men Alike?; behind it he swapped fedoras for ledgers, steering low-budget but high-octane pictures such as A Man’s World (1942) and the Istanbul-set spy yarn Flame of Stamboul (1951). Off-set he quietly shared life’s script with actress Doris May. Their final curtain call together came more than half a century later, on 30 October 1978, when MacDonald—by then a sun-warmed Santa Barbara resident—left the stage for good at age eighty-seven.