Walter Long

Biography

Long’s first leading role away from the camera was opposite Luray Huntley, a kinetic brunette who belonged to Griffith’s resident troupe. The two met under the glow of klieg lights, traded lines in the one-reel sensation Traffic in Souls, reunited for the playful Let Katie Do It, and stood amid Babylon’s plaster elephants for Intolerance—every frame sealing a romance that followed them off-set. In 1919 the Spanish flu rewrote the script: Luray died at twenty-eight, and Long’s partnership with her—on-screen and off—closed with the final curtain of the epidemic.