William S. Hart

William Surrey Hart was born on December 6, 1864 in Newburgh, New York, United States. Undisputed face of the western in his silent stage, the voice of the actor, screenwriter and director was only heard in his last film,the son of the prairie(1925), and only in a nostalgic prologue recorded in 1939 in which his longing for the West of his youth is noted. Because, after all, his frontier stories had a personal component, since in his youth in Dakota he learned the language of the Sioux Indians, and in Kansas he worked as a true cowboy; The prairie was undoubtedly an old acquaintance to him, and in his English parents he knew what colonists were trying to establish themselves in the promising new world. In New York he worked as a postal clerk, but in 1888 he decided that his true calling was to be an actor, and he was seen on the stage. But in the cinema, thanks to his knowledge of the old West, he emerged as an indispensable actor, screenwriter and director. The laconic and somewhat monolithic character, almost a mask, who he plays in almost all of his films, is identical, a brave man, in defense of justice and the weakest, who does not hesitate to act violently and even breaking the rules if necessary. Its personality seems modeled after yours.

He had a small role inThe Fugitive (1914), by the teacher Cecil B. DeMille . Thomas H. Ince would trust him, and for his Triangle company he would make a good handful of two-reel films, about twenty minutes long, simple and effective for what the public of the time demanded. In any case, with the passage of time, Hart would be somewhat disenchanted by the way in which Hollywood painted a West that he knew, it cannot be forgotten, for example, that he is a contemporary of Wild Bill Hicock, whom he would play in the film of the same title by Clifford Smith in 1924. Not surprisingly, the melancholy that is breathed in The Son of the Prairie, where the race to get a piece of land picks up with unusual force.

After that film, Hart -who was married to the actress Winifred Wistover, who gave him a son, but whom he divorced in 1927-, retired to his ranch in Newhall, California, where he died on June 23, 1946. He had previously published some memoirs, “My Life East and West”. His house would become a museum.