William Carleton Sr.

Biography

Long before Hollywood’s streets were paved with star-studded dreams, William Carleton Sr. stepped into the flicker of early cinema, leaving ghostly footprints in two 1915 one-reel wonders. That March he spun through the ballroom drama of Vitagraph’s “The Whirl of Life,” and before the year’s leaves turned he was pocketing stolen diamonds in “The Phantom Thief.”