Herbert Brenon

Herbert Brenon was born in Dublin and raised partly in London before emigrating to America as a teenager, where he worked in vaudeville and theatrical management before entering films in the early 1910s. He learned fast and aimed high, and by the 1920s he was one of Hollywood's most respected directors — a meticulous, sometimes tyrannical craftsman with a taste for prestige literary adaptations and a real tenderness for stories of innocence and sacrifice.

His silent work holds up remarkably. He directed the first screen version of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1924), a charming, inventive fantasy made with Barrie's involvement and full of practical stage magic. He mounted the original Beau Geste (1926), the definitive telling of the Foreign Legion adventure, with Ronald Colman as the doomed, honorable brother — a huge success that still shapes how the story is imagined. He made an early adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926), now lost, and the sentimental Sorrell and Son (1927), which brought him a nomination at the first Academy Awards. Earlier he had directed the swimming star Annette Kellerman in the daring Neptune's Daughter (1914).

Brenon was a name to conjure with — and then, almost overnight, he wasn't. He disliked the coming of sound and adapted to it poorly, and a temperament that brooked no interference did him no favors as the studios centralized control. His American assignments dried up in the early thirties; he moved to England and directed modestly there for a few more years before retiring altogether. He died in Los Angeles in 1958. A director once ranked with the best in the world, responsible for two or three of the silent era's most enduring entertainments, he has slipped almost entirely out of popular memory — a textbook case of importance outrunning fame.