Rex Ingram
actor, director, writer
- Birth name:
- Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock
- Born:
- 1892-01-15, Dublin, Ireland
- Died:
- 1950-07-21, North Hollywood, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, director, writer
Biography
Rex Ingram arrived in pictures wielding a paintbrush, not a megaphone, decorating sets until the day Universal let him trade pigments for a director’s chair. The Great Problem (1916) announced the switch, but Hollywood’s bookkeeping circus and the thin gruel of local scripts soon bored him. He hunted Europe for meatier stories, colliding with Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez; their partnership handed an unknown Rudolph Valentino the part that lit the fuse on stardom. Between shoots, Ingram nursed a friendship with Erich von Stroheim, another visionary who treated budgets as polite suggestions. In 1924 he fled west-coast noise for the Mediterranean calm of Nice, built his own studios on sun-baked hills, and—usually starring wife Alice Terry—made whatever film he pleased. Later, when the cameras cooled, he schooled an eager Michael Powell in the grammar of images, passing the torch across generations.
