HARRY CAREY - silent film actor, cowboy, author, lawyer and playwright
Born January 16th 1878 in Bronx, 116th Street, New York City, New York
Died September 21nd 1947 in Brentwood, California
Burried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NYC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Carey_(actor)
Harry Carey (Sr)
Born on January 16, 1878, in Bronx, NY, Henry DeWitt Carey II was the son of a prominent lawyer who was the president of a sewing machine company. He was educated at Hamilton Military Academy but, seduced by the stage, turned down an appointment to West Point and appeared briefly as an actor in a stock company. He returned to the "respectable" life and enrolled in New York University to learn the law, but his studies were interrupted by a severe case of pneumonia that resulted from a boating accident in Long Island Sound when he was 21 years old.
Carey's love of horses was instilled in him at a young age as he watched New York City's mounted policemen go through their paces in the 1880s, and while recuperating he wrote a play, "Montana," about the Western frontier. He decided to star in his own creation, and the play proved a big success when mounted as a stock production in the middle of the decade. Audiences were thrilled by a bit of business where Carey brought his horse onto the stage.
For three years Carey made quite a bit of money touring the provinces with "Montana." After that production was played out, he wrote another play, a Klondike tale entitled "Heart of Alaska," which was presented as "Two Women and that Man" on Broadway. Despite the production's attention to detail--the play featured live sled dogs and wolves and the theater was scented with pine oil before the doors opened--it flopped, playing only 16 performances after opening at the Majestic Theatre on October 18, 1909. Harry, credited as Henry D. Carey, took the show on the road, but as the Chicago Tribune pointed out that only the dogs were convincing.
Discarding thoughts of following his father's footsteps and becoming a lawyer, Harry continued his involvement with acting, now well past the flirtation stage. Having lost his money on the "Alaska" play, Harry turned to the movies, the production of which was centered in the New York City metropolitan area at that time. His first credited picture of any importance was Bill Sharkey's Last Game (1910) (a short directed by D W Griffith)
He alternated between Western and non-Western roles for the next couple of years, until in 1915 he signed with the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. at $150 a week (approximately $1,850 a week in 2005 dollars), a substantial salary for a movie actor nearly a century ago.
It was at Universal that Harry Carey became a silent film cowboy star, playing "Cheyenne Harry" in a series of two-reel westerns.
Throughout the 1920s Carey was a western superstar who occasionally assumed screenwriting, producing and directing assignments, as he had in the early days at Universal.
In 1926 Carey left PDC for Pathe Pictures, a studio that had a reputation for turning out some of the finest of the silent westerns. He made one of his best silent Westerns at Pathe, Satan Town (1926), a movie evocative of the William S. Hart classic Hell's Hinges (1916).
When the sound era dawned at the end of the decade, Carey was still a top western star and very highly paid, but he did not enjoy the superstar status of Mix, Gibson, Maynard and Buck Jones. He also was 50 years old with a career stretching back 20 years to the days of the nickelodeon. Considering him passé, Pathe failed to renew his contract.
Subsequently, Harry and Olive Carey made the rounds of vaudeville, but their act wasn't very successful and the couple disliked the incessant traveling. While traveling the vaudeville circuit, their ranch was completely destroyed when the San Francisquito Dam burst and flooded the Santa Clarita Valley, a disaster in which hundreds of people died.
Carey returned to the movies, demoted to supporting roles in the early talkies. He had a face and body that could express emotion, trained as it was n the silent picture, but also had a voice that registered strongly on film.
Harry Carey died on September 21, 1947, the causes of his death given as emphysema, lung cancer and coronary thrombosis. When he was interred in the Carey family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, clad in a cowboy outfit, over 1,000 admirers turned out for the funeral
Harry Carey was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 1521 Vine Street.
In 1976 he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. He was posthumously awarded a Golden Boot by the Motion Picture & Television Fund Foundation in 1991.
(sources; imdb.com)