John Cromwell (director)
| John Cromwell | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Elwood Dager Cromwell December 23, 1887 Toledo, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | September 26, 1979 (aged 91) Santa Barbara, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor, director, producer |
| Years active | 1912–1978 |
| Spouse(s) | Alice Lindahl Marie Goff Kay Johnson (1928–1946) Ruth Nelson (1946–1979) |
Elwood Dager Cromwell (December 23, 1887 – September 26, 1979), known as John Cromwell, was a highly regarded American film and stage actor, as well as a film director during the Golden Age of the studios, spanning the early days of sound to 1950s film noir, whose directing career was cut short by the Hollywood blacklist.
Born in Toledo, Ohio to a well-off Scottish-English family, executives in the steel and iron industry that had not yet rusted, Cromwell went to private high school at Howe Military Academy, in nearby Indiana, but never pursued a higher education. Instead, he fell in love with theater in Chicago and then made his way to New York City and a life in theater there in his early 20's.
He made his Broadway debut in Little Women (1912) in an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel by Marian De Forest. This version of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy was an immediate hit and ran for 184 performances. His first directing effort, The Painted Woman (1913), failed, but young Cromwell was soon taken under the wing of William Bundy's Playhouse theater and spent the next fifteen years as the kind of traditional actor/stage manager of the time who put on dozens of plays on Broadway's stages.
By 1914, he was acting in and co-directing Too Many Cooks (1914), which ran for 223 performances. He was in American productions of two George Bernard Shaw plays: First in Shaw's anti-war Major Barbara," the 1905 play of a devout young woman in The Salvation Army and her tortured relationship with her wealthy father, a munitions dealer. By the time the play got to Broadway in 1915, the war Shaw feared had broken out in Europe. And, in 1916, Cromwell played in a revival ofCaptain Brassbound's Conversion.
Soon Cromwell himself was shipped off for a brief stint in the U.S.Army in World War I.
By the 1920s, he had become a respected Broadway director, staging and still occasionally acting in works by future Pulitzer-Prize-winners Sidney Howard and Robert E. Sherwood, performing in the rarely-seen Ibsen play, LIttle Eyolf and being an in-house director for his mentor, William Bundy. In 1927, Cromwell directed and played the lead in the gangster drama, The Racket , with newcomer Edward G. Robinson debuting in the kind of tough guy role that would become synonymous with his name.
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