George Bancroft (actor)
George Bancroft was an American
film actor, whose career spanned seventeen years from 1925 to 1942. A star of pre-Code Hollywood, he is best known as the tough guy lead in four Josef von Sternberg films, the last of which, Thunderbolt earned him a Best Actor Award nomination. He was later a supporting actor in a number of notable movies, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Stagecoach.
Early years
Bancroft was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1882. He attended Tomes Institute in Port Deposit, Maryland.Maritime work
After working on merchant marine vessels at age 14, Bancroft was an apprentice on and later served on and West Indies. Additionally, during the Battle of Manila Bay, he was a gunner on. During his days in the Navy, he staged plays aboard ship.In 1900, he swam underneath the hull of the battleship to check the extent of the damage after it struck a rock off the coast of China. For this, he was appointed to the United States Naval Academy, but found it too restrictive for his tastes and left to pursue a theatrical career.
Acting career
In 1901, Bancroft began acting in earnest, as he toured in plays and had juvenile leads in musical comedies. In vaudeville, he did blackface routines and impersonated celebrities. His Broadway credits include the musical comedies Cinders and The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly.One of his early films was The Journey's End. Bancroft's first starring role was in The Pony Express, and the next year he played an important supporting role in a cast including Wallace Beery, Charles Farrell and Esther Ralston in the period naval widescreen epic Old Ironsides. He then had his finest period as a lead actor, starring in four Paramount productions directed by Josef von Sternberg: Underworld, The Drag Net, The Docks of New York and Thunderbolt ; the latter earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He played the title role in The Wolf of Wall Street, appeared in Paramount's all-star revue Paramount on Parade and starred in Rowland Brown's Blood Money, condemned by the censors because they feared the film would "incite law-abiding citizens to crime."
Reportedly, he refused to fall down on set after a prop revolver was fired at him, saying "Just one bullet can't stop Bancroft!".
Bancroft enjoyed his career height in the late 1920s, his thirties' films where he was the leading man, didn't quite have the same impact and by 1936 he had slipped to being a supporting actor; although he still appeared in such classics as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town with Gary Cooper, Angels with Dirty Faces with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Each Dawn I Die with Cagney and George Raft, and Stagecoach with John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell. In 1942, he left Hollywood to be a full-time rancher.