Willard Mack
actor, director, writer
- Birth name:
- Charles Willard McLaughlin
- Born:
- 1873-09-18, Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada
- Died:
- 1934-11-18, Brentwood Heights, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, director, writer
Biography
A hundred and fifty miles upstream from Montreal, in the river-town of Morrisburg, Willard Mack drew his first breath on 18 September 1873. By the time the world heard his name, he had already traded the quiet Canadian banks of the St. Lawrence for the roar of Broadway and the glare of Hollywood klieg lights. Between footlights and camera lenses, he spun stories—sometimes as the suave actor audiences applauded, more often as the unseen hand scripting their emotions. His fingerprints are on the tart social exposé What Price Innocence? (1933), the jazz-age thriller The Voice of the City (1929), and the Depression-era drama Together We Live (1935). Off-screen, his leading ladies were real: four marriages—to Pauline Frederick, Marjorie Rambeau, Maude Leone, and Beatrice Banyard—each a headline in the tabloids he loved to feed. The final curtain fell on 18 November 1934, high in the Brentwood Heights canyons above Los Angeles, but the dialogue he wrote still crackles, waiting for the next projector to start.
