Henry B. Walthall

Time is a curious thing. There are no few people alive today who shared the screen with Lillian Gish, one of the first movie stars—a woman whose acting career goes back to about the turn of the last century. She, in turn, shared the screen with Henry B. Walthall, who dropped out of law school to fight in the Spanish-American War and whose father had been a Confederate soldier. Shake the hand of Alan Alda or Sal Rubinek and you’re shaking the hand of someone who acted opposite a star of the Biograph Company. And when her costar in Birth of a Nation was onscreen, he was there as someone who could have heard his father’s stories of doing the same thing.

Walthall was Southern enough so that not only was his father a former Confederate captain but he owned a cotton plantation. I don’t know where he attended school, but he dropped out and enlisted. He then contracted malaria without ever making it out of Florida, and by the time he recovered, the war was over. Rather than return to law school, he went to New York to become an actor. I don’t know why. I know I’d rather be an actress than go to law school, but you figure the number of lawyers out there indicates that it isn’t true of everyone.

He was introduced to D. W. Griffith and in 1909 made the switch from the stage to the screen. As with everyone else in those days, he started by making up to dozens of shorts a year, but by 1914, he was starting to make features. Griffith cast him as Holofernes in Judith of Bethulia, which at just over an hour wasn’t exactly an epic but was possibly the only Biblical movie made by Griffith. This one, however, required careful filming to disguise the fact that Walthall was a short, slight man nothing like the imposing general of the Bible.

He kept working with the coming of sound. Fewer of his sound films are now considered lost, but it’s still a non-zero number. They’re also, shall we say, less problematic than Griffith’s films. Okay, it’s not great that there’s a movie about Pancho Villa with Wallace Beery in the lead. Or a movie where he plays a South American president named Valenzuela. Or his last movie, China Clipper, which features no Chinese people in it—as characters or Chinese people cast. Still, it’s not Birth of a Nation, which means there’s nowhere to go but up, right?

No one seems to quite agree what he died of. Wikipedia says “an intestinal illness.” IMDb says tuberculosis, but his IMDb biography says influenza. FindAGrave declines to suggest. The LA Times says “exhaustion and intestinal influenza.” Exhaustion seems indisputable. It was typical to do a ton of movies a year in the silent era when most of them were shorts anyway. He died halfway through 1936 and had six movies released that year and was starting on a seventh. That’s a grueling schedule for a man whose health was likely not great since that whole malaria thing.