Harry Carey

Biography

Harry Carey’s story begins on a Bronx street in 1878, the son of a judge who also ran a sewing-machine empire. City Island’s salt wind raised him; Hamilton Military Academy drilled him; West Point beckoned, but Carey shrugged and enrolled instead at New York Law School, swapping parade grounds for lecture halls alongside classmates like future mayor James J. Walker. A boating spill and a bout of pneumonia derailed the bar exam—while convalescing he hammered out a stage play, then toured it coast-to-coast for three profitable years. The follow-up flopped, emptying every dollar. 1911: Henry B. Walthall steered him onto a Biograph set and into the orbit of D.W. Griffith; Carey’s lanky frame and gravel voice soon galloped across flickering frontiers. A second marriage to actress Olive Fuller Golden enlarged both his household and his destiny—she brought a young John Ford to dinner; Carey convinced Universal’s Carl Laemmle to gamble on the kid. The Ford–Carey wagon rolled hard through a string of saddle epics until 1921, when the wheels came off their friendship. By then Carey was the first cowboy hero audiences trusted, sometimes scribbling scripts or calling “Action!” himself. Talkies nudged him into weather-beaten character parts; in 1939 he gavelled the Senate as the bemused vice-president in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and pocketed an Oscar nod. Ford lured him back for The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), and in 1948 Howard Hawks framed both Carey and his look-alike boy, Harry Jr., in the sweeping cattle-drive canvas of Red River. Emphysema and cancer finally roped him in 1947. Ford closed the circle the following year, dedicating his remake of 3 Godfathers “To Harry Carey—Bright Star Of The Early Western Sky.”