Willard Mack


Willard Mack was a Canadian-American actor, director, and playwright.

Life and career

He was born Charles Willard McLaughlin in Morrisburg, Ontario. At an early age his family moved to Brooklyn, New York. After two years, they moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where McLaughlin finished high school. His parents returned to Canada, but he went on to study at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C., where he became involved in student plays. Adopting the stage name Willard Mack, after graduation he took minor acting jobs for a few years and did Shakespearian repertoire. However, writing scripts was what he was most interested in, and his second effort, about the North-West Mounted Police, In Wyoming, was a commercial success and was later the basis for his film Nanette of the Wilds. Throughout his life, Mack frequently returned to Canada. Some of his other plays, including Tiger Rose and The Scarlet Fox, were set in northern Alberta.
In 1914 he made his acting debut on Broadway in a play he had written. Over the next fourteen years, he would write a further twenty-two Broadway productions, acting in ten of them and producing four. For a time, Willard Mack operated a stock company with actress Maude Leone. In the mid-1920s, he met an aspiring stage actress named Ruby Stevens hired as a chorus girl for his new play. Mack coached Stevens's acting and rewrote parts of the play to expand her role and then persuaded her to change her name to Barbara Stanwyck.
During his time on Broadway, Mack began writing for motion pictures, and although he performed in fifteen films and directed four, he was primarily a writer. At first he remained on the east coast but later moved to Los Angeles. A number of his plays were made into motion pictures, and between 1916 and 1933 he was involved with the writing of more than seventy film scripts. Starting out in silent film, he made his talkie debut as actor, director, and co-writer of the 1929 film Voice of the City. In 1933 he directed What Price Innocence?. He then wrote and directed Broadway to Hollywood, a backstage musical that spanned nearly five decades recounting the struggles of a vaudeville family.
He was married four times, to actresses Maude Leone, Marjorie Rambeau, Pauline Frederick, and Beatrice Banyard.
His writing success made him a wealthy man. He died from heart disease at his home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California in 1934.
File:Willard Mack Clara Williams 1916.jpg|thumb|left|400px|Unemployed worker John Adams and his wife are faced with bills they cannot pay in a still from The Corner.

Plays

  • Kick In
  • Tiger Rose
  • Blind Youth
  • The Logic of Larry
  • Fu Manchu : A Chinese Melodrama - written with Sax Rohmer
  • The Dove
  • The Noose
  • A Free Soul
  • ''Spring 3100''

    Filmography

  • Kick In, directed by George Fitzmaurice
  • Aladdin's Other Lamp, directed by John H. Collins
  • Blind Youth, directed by Edward Sloman
  • The Common Sin, directed by Burton L. King
  • Kick In, directed by George Fitzmaurice
  • Your Friend and Mine, directed by Clarence G. Badger
  • Tiger Rose, directed by Sidney Franklin
  • The Dove, directed by Roland West
  • The Noose, directed by John Francis Dillon
  • Tiger Rose, directed by George Fitzmaurice
  • Kick In, directed by Richard Wallace
  • A Free Soul, directed by Clarence Brown
  • Girl of the Rio, directed by Herbert Brenon
  • Jealousy, directed by Roy William Neill
  • The Drag-Net, directed by Vin Moore
  • I'd Give My Life, directed by Edwin L. Marin
  • The Girl and the Gambler, directed by Lew Landers
  • The Girl Who Had Everything, directed by Richard Thorpe

    Screenwriter

  • The Lost Bridegroom
  • The Saleslady
  • Her Maternal Right
  • A Gutter Magdalene
  • Nanette of the Wilds
  • The Highway of Hope
  • Who's Your Neighbor?
  • Yankee Pluck
  • The Woman Beneath
  • Go West, Young Man
  • The Wasp
  • The Hell Cat
  • Shadows
  • One Week of Life
  • The Valley of Doubt
  • Heritage
  • Welcome Stranger
  • Little Robinson Crusoe
  • The Rag Man
  • The Monster
  • Old Clothes
  • Madame X,
  • His Glorious Night,
  • Untamed
  • It's a Great Life
  • Caught Short
  • Men of the North
  • Reducing
  • Sidewalks of New York
  • The Billion Dollar Scandal
  • Strictly Personal
  • Night of Terror
  • Song of the Eagle
  • ''Nana''

    Director

  • Voice of the City
  • What Price Innocence?
  • Broadway to Hollywood
  • ''Together We Live''

    Actor

  • Aloha Oe, as David Harmon
  • The Edge of the Abyss, as Jim Sims
  • The Corner, as John Adams
  • Nanette of the Wilds, as Constable Thomas O'Brien
  • The Woman on the Index, as Hugo Declasse
  • Your Friend and Mine, as Ted Mason
  • Voice of the City, as Detective Biff Myers
  • What Price Innocence?, as Dr. Dan Davidge
  • Together We Live, as Hank