Rupert Julian

Rupert Julian (25 January 1879 – 27 December 1943) was a New Zealand cinema actor, director, writer and producer.

Julian (right) with Ruth Clifford and an unidentified actor in The Fire Flingers (1919)

Biography

Born Thomas Percival Hayes in Whangaroa, New Zealand, son of John Daly Hayes (Jr) and Eliza Harriet Hayes. Rupert Julian performed on stage in his native country and Australia before emigrating to the United States in 1911, where he started his career as an actor at the Daly Theatre in New York and touring with Tyrone Power, Sr., and then worked in silent movies. He turned to directing in 1915, often directing his wife Elsie Jane Wilson (also a director), and earned a substantial sum for his film The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, which he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the title role. This made him a star in Hollywood at the time, and opened doors to larger projects with Universal Studios.

He was assigned to complete Merry-Go-Round in 1923 when director Erich von Stroheim was fired from it. In 1924, he directed Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, but left the production shortly before it was released. The studio hired another director to complete the filming, and changed the ending. Julian moved to Cecil B. DeMille's Producers Distributing Corporation for a series of films, but after directing The Cat Creeps and Love Comes Along (both in 1930), his career faded.

Rupert Julian died of a stroke in Hollywood, California at the age of 64 and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, in 1943. His wife Elsie died in 1965.

Selected filmography

As actor

As director
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.