Richard Barthelmess

Richard Barthelmess was born in New York City in 1895, the son of an actress, and grew up around the theater. A family friendship with the stage star Alla Nazimova opened the door to the movies, and he soon fell into the orbit of D.W. Griffith, who saw in his gentle, expressive face the perfect vessel for tenderness and suffering.

He gave two of the silent era's most sensitive performances back to back for Griffith. In Broken Blossoms (1919) he played Cheng Huan, a gentle immigrant who shelters a brutalized girl, in a role that, for all the dated conventions of the era, is astonishing for its delicacy and restraint. In Way Down East (1920) he was the earnest young man who plunges across the ice floes to snatch Lillian Gish from the brink of a waterfall, one of the most famous rescues in film.

Barthelmess then took charge of his own career, co-founding a production company and starring in Tol'able David (1921), a beautifully observed rural drama that became his signature and a model of understated screen acting. His standing was confirmed when the film industry handed out its first Academy Awards: he was among the very first actors ever nominated for Best Actor, cited for his work in The Noose and The Patent Leather Kid.

Unlike many silent stars, he survived the coming of sound, giving strong performances into the 1930s in pictures such as the aviation drama The Dawn Patrol and, memorably, as the disgraced flyer seeking redemption in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939). But his brand of soulful silent heroism belonged to an earlier age, and he retired from the screen in the early 1940s, serving in the Naval Reserve during the war and living quietly until his death in 1963. He remains one of the finest and least celebrated leading men of the silent period, an actor whose subtlety still reads as modern.