Rex Ingram

Born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin in 1893, the son of a clergyman, Ingram emigrated to America and studied sculpture at Yale before the movies drew him west. That training in form shows in every frame he composed; he thought like a sculptor about bodies, faces, and the fall of light, and he had an unusual painterly patience for atmosphere.

In 1921 he directed The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an anti-war epic drawn from Blasco Ibáñez's novel, and in its tango sequence turned an unknown bit player named Rudolph Valentino into the decade's great romantic idol overnight. The film was a sensation and made Ingram, briefly, one of the most admired directors in Hollywood — a rival in prestige to Griffith and Stroheim. He followed with the swashbuckling The Prisoner of Zenda (1922), the revolutionary romance Scaramouche (1923), and the shimmering Mare Nostrum (1926), often starring his wife and muse, the serene Alice Terry, and shot by his devoted cameraman John Seitz.

Ingram was a romantic and something of an aesthete, more interested in beauty and exotic locale than in the industrial pace of the studios. Chafing under MGM's new supervisory regime after the merger that put the young Irving Thalberg over him, he left California altogether and set up his own studio at Nice on the French Riviera, making handsomely mounted pictures far from the front office. But the coming of sound found him uninterested and out of step; he directed only one talkie and then simply stopped, retiring to write, sculpt, and travel. He died in North Hollywood in 1950. Once spoken of among the finest directors in the world, he is now among the most unjustly forgotten of the silent era's true artists.