Hobart Bosworth
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Hobart Bosworth (b. on August 11, 1867 in Marietta, Ohio, - d. on December 30, 1943 in Glendale, California) was a movie actor, director, writer and producer. Born Hobart Van Zandt Bosworth, Bosworth was a direct descendant of Miles Standish and of John and Priscilla Alden on his father's side and of New York's Van Zandt family, the first Dutch settlers to land in the New World, on his mother's side. Bosworth was always proud of his lineage.
After his mother passed away, his father remarried and young Hobart tool a dislike to his stepmother. Convinced he was "ill used and cruelly treated", in 1914, he told an interviewerhe ran away from for New York City. There he signed as a cabin boy for Sovereign of the Seas, a clipper ship, and was soon set out to sea.
After his first voyage, a five-month affair that took him from New York to San Francisco, Hobart spent his wages on candy. Sleeping it off on a bench in the park in back of Trinity Church, the young boy didn't know when dozing off that the organ music was being played by his own uncle. A Captain Roberts, who found stevedore work for tghe lad, told him of his uncle's presence in San Francisco. He continued as a sailor as the sea was in his family's blood, eventually spending three years at sea.
He once told an interviewer, "All my people were of the sea and my father was a naval officer". He spent eleven months on an old fashion whaler plying the Artic region, then back in San Francisco, he was employed doing odd jobs. When becoming a semi-professional boxer and wrestler, Bosworth tried ranching in the Southern California and Mexico, where he learned to become an expert horseman. Finally, he his interest in arts llead him to the stage.
Thinking he'd like to become a landscape painter, a friend suggested that he work as a stage manager to raise the money to stufy art. Acting on his firend's advice, Bosworth obtained a job with McKnee Rankin as a stage manager at the California Theatre in San Francisco.. With enough money, he undertook the study of painting. Eventually, he was pressed into duty as an actor with a small part with three lines. Though he botched the lines, he was given other small roles. Bosworth was eighteen years old and on the cusp of a life in the theater.
Hobarth singed on with Louis Morrison to be part of a road company for a season as both an actor and as Morrison's dresser, playing Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" and "Measure for Measure". During his time with the company, Hobarth and another writer wrot a version of "Faust" that Morrison used for twnty years in repertory. By 1887, he was acting at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, and eventually, he was proficient enough on stage to give Shakespearean canon by the time he was twnty-one years old, though he admitted that he was the worset Macbeth ever.
Bosworth eventually wound up in Park City, Utah, where he had to work in a mine, pushing an ore wagon in order to raise money. He escaped the pits to tour with the magician Hermann the Great as the conjurer's assistant for a tour through Mexico.
For the first time in eleven years, the 21-year-old Bosworth met his father. Hobarth recalled, "He look at me and said, 'Hum! I couldn't lick you now, son.'" They never met again.
He arrived back in New York in [December 1888 and was hired by Augustine Daly to play Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It. He did so well in the role, Daly kept him on. Bosworth remained with Daly's company for ten years, in which he played mostly minor parts. Seven times while he was with the company, it made foreign tours, playing in Berlin, Cologne, London, Paris and other European cities.
Eventually, being kept in small parts eroded his confidence, and Bosworth left Daly to sign on with Julia Marlowe, who cast him leads in Shakespean plays. Just as Bosworth began to taste stage stardom in New York, he was struck down with tuberculosis, a very serious ailment in the 19th century.
Bosworth was forced to give up the stage he was not allowed to toil indoors. Though he made a rapid recovery, he returned to the stage too quickly and suffered a relapse. For the rest of his working life, he balanced his acting periods of rest so as to keep his T.B. under control.
Bosworth re-established himself as a lead actor on the new York stage, appearing in the 1903 Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler". He also appeaed that year on the Great White Way as the lead in Marta of the Lowlands. The role propelled him to Broadway stardom. However he was forced again to give up the stage when he lost seventy pouns in ten weeks.
Moving to Tempe, Arizona to partake of the salubrious climate inporve his chances battling T.B., and eventually, he got the disease under control. While he was not an invalid, he was forced to live like one and remaoine in a warm climate lest he suffer a relapse. The TB robbed him of his voice, but since he was no longer on stage, it didnt matter. Ther was a new medim for actors: Motion pictures. Bosworth moved to San Diego which has a reputation of having the most perfect climate in the continental United States, and in 1908, he was contracted to make a motion picture by the Selig Polyscope Company. Shooting was to be down in the out-doors, and he did not have to use his voice, which was in poor condition. Bosworth once said, "I believe, after all, that it is the motion pictures that have saved my life. How could I have lived on and on, without being able to carry outany of my cherished ambitions? What would mylife have meant? Here, in pictures, I am realizing my biggest hopes." Signing with the Selig Polyscope Co., Hobarth eventually spearheaded the movie company to Los Angeles. Bosworth is widely credited with being the star of the first movie made on the West Coast. Due to his role in pioneering California for the film industry, Bosworth often was referred to as the "Dean of Hollywood". He wrote the scenarios for the scond and third pictures he acted in, and directed the third. According to his own count, he evenually wrote 112 scenarios and produced eighty-four pictures of Selig. Bosworth was attracted to Jack London's work due to his out-of-doors filming experience and the requirements of his health, which obviated acting in studios.
In 1913, he started his own company, Hobart Bosworth Productions Company., to produce a series of Jack London melodramas. He produced, directed and directed the company's first pictur palying Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf in the same year the company started. Jack London himself also appeared as a sailor. The movie was release in the U.S. by W.W. Hodkinson Corp. and States Right Independent Exchanges.
D.W. Griffith also released a Jack London pciture that year, Two Men of the Desert, but Hobarth followed up The Sea Wolf with The Chechako the following year with Jack Conway playing the lead as "Smoke Bellew", the title character of the epnymous London novel the movie is based on. The Chechako and some of the sequent Bosworth-London pcitures were distributed through Paramount, the releasing arm of Famous Players-Lasky.
CConway also starred in the Bosworth-directed follow-up The Valley of the Moon in which Bosworth has a supporting role as an actor. He also appeared as an actor in John Barleycorn which he co-directed with J. Charles Haydon, He produced, directed, wrote, and acted in Martin Eden and An Odyssey of the North, playing the lead in the latter, which was released by Paramont. He finished up with the series by producing, directing, and playing the lead in the two-part Burning Daylight series: The Adventures of Burning Daylight and both were released by Paramont.
Bosworth hooked up with the Oliver Photography Company, making its Los Angeles facility on North Occidental Boulevard his headquarters. Subsequently, Bosworth Inc. and Oilver Morosco Productions a total of thirty-one pcitures, most which starred Bosworth. The company ceased operations after producing The Sea Lion.
The merger with Paramont ended the period in Bosworth's creative life where he was a major force in the motion picture industry. which was undergoing changes as the industry mature and solified. He directed his picture before the merger, The White Scar, hwich he also wrote and starred in for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. After his own production company wound up, Hobart Boswroth wqound up playing supporting roles as an actor. He divorced his first wife, Adele Farrington, in 1919, the year their son George was born.
Bosworth then survived the transition to sound. Aside from appearing Warner Brothers' showcase The Show of Shows in 1929, his talking debut proper was in the short subject A Man in Peace for Vitaphone, while his first sound feature was Vitaphone's Ruritana drama General Crack, starring John Barrymore.
Though he appeared in small roles in A-list films, including somev classics, Bosworth primarily made his living as a prominently billed character actor in B-Westerns and serials churned out by Poverty Row studios. In all his roles in A and B pcitures, he typically was typecast as a fatherly type assaying dads, clergymen, judges,etc.
All together, Bosworth acted in over 250 movies, directed forty-four movies, wrote twent-seven and produced eleven of them. His actual count might be hundreds more.
Hobart Bosworth died of pneumonia in Glendale, California. Survived by his second wife and his son george, he was seventy-six years old.
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