William Worthington

Biography

Troy, New York, 1872: a restless charmer named William Worthington enters the world, grows up, and by the late 1890s owns the gas-lit stages of Broadway—opatic arias, velvet-draped melodramas, rowdy vaudeville houses, he conquers them all. When flickering images start luring audiences west, he follows the siren call, stepping off the train in Hollywood in 1913. Weeks later he makes his screen bow in The Restless Spirit, trading lines at Victor Film Co. with J. Warren Kerrigan and Jessalyn Van Trump. The camera loves him: in 1914 he is the loyal Damon of Damon and Pythias, then the ramrod-straight General Washington in The Spy; twelve years later he doffs his top-hat as Eleanor’s exasperated father in Kid Boots, keeping pace with Eddie Cantor’s comic cyclone for Famous Players-Lasky. Between 1917 and 1925 Worthington moves behind the lens, guiding pictures as a director and, ever the entrepreneur, launching Multicolor, an early color-process studio that flickers brightly until Cinecolor swallows it in 1932. Talkies arrive; he slips effortlessly back in front of the camera, lending silver-haired authority to judges, doctors, bankers—bit parts, yet impossible to forget. He never really retires; cameras roll, he shows up, until death finally calls “cut” in 1941.