Marshall Neilan

Marshall "Mickey" Neilan was a Hollywood natural. Born in San Bernardino, California, and thrown into work young after his family lost its money, he was a chauffeur, then an actor, then, before he was thirty, one of the most sought-after directors in the business. Handsome, quick-witted, and irresistibly charming, he had an easy touch with actors and a light, warm storytelling style that made his films feel effortless.

His great collaboration was with Mary Pickford, the most powerful star in the world, who trusted him above all other directors and made some of her finest pictures under him — Stella Maris (1918), in which she played a dual role of extraordinary pathos, the beloved Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, and others. He directed the ambitious location drama Tess of the Storm Country and a long run of hits through the late teens and early twenties, and he married the actress Blanche Sweet. At his peak he was among the highest-paid and best-loved men in the industry.

And he threw it away. Neilan was constitutionally incapable of deference, feuding openly with the executives — Louis B. Mayer among them — who were consolidating power, and his drinking grew from convivial to catastrophic. He kept whole crews waiting, disappeared on binges, missed his own productions. As Hollywood tightened into a disciplined corporate machine in the twenties and thirties, there was less and less room for a brilliant, unreliable free spirit. The assignments dwindled to nothing; the money vanished. He spent his last decades in obscurity, a cautionary legend, and died of throat cancer in Los Angeles in 1958. Orson Welles gave the old man a small part as a senator in Touch of Evil not long before the end — a last nod to a talent Hollywood had once adored and then discarded.