Donald Crisp

Donald Crisp was a film actor, director, producer, and screenwriter whose career extended from the silent film era through the early 1960s, and who appeared on Broadway between 1908 and 1911. Born George William Crisp on 27 July 1882 at 3 Clay Hall Road, Bow, London, he was the youngest of ten children born to Elizabeth and James Crisp, a labourer. Throughout his life in Hollywood, Crisp maintained a Scottish accent and claimed to have been born in 1880 in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland, though research conducted decades after his death established that he had no connections to Scotland. He also made unverified claims about his education at Eton and Oxford, his father's profession as a cattle farmer, country doctor, or royal physician to King Edward VII, and his service as a trooper in the 10th Hussars during the Boer War. Despite the false origins, a plaque commemorating him was unveiled in Aberfeldy in 1996 by Scottish comedian Jimmy Logan.

Crisp's path to the stage began in July 1906 aboard the SS Carmania, where his singing during a ship's concert drew the attention of opera impresario John C. Fisher, who offered him immediate employment. He spent his first year in New York in grand opera and the following year working as a stage director, touring with Fisher's company through the United States and Cuba. By 1910 he had adopted the name Donald and was serving as stage manager for entertainer, composer, and playwright George M. Cohan. His Broadway appearances during this period included the musicals The Yankee Prince and The Little Millionaire. It was during his time working in the theatre that Crisp first encountered film director D.W. Griffith, and when Griffith traveled to Hollywood in 1912, Crisp went with him.

Between 1908 and 1930, Crisp appeared in nearly 100 silent films while simultaneously directing dozens more. His most prominent acting role during this period came when Griffith cast him as General Ulysses S. Grant in The Birth of a Nation in 1915. He also delivered a notable performance as Battling Burrows, the abusive father in Griffith's 1919 film Broken Blossoms, opposite Lillian Gish. As a director, Crisp completed approximately 70 films over fifteen years, beginning with Little Country Mouse in 1914. Among his most recognized directorial efforts were The Navigator in 1924, starring Buster Keaton, and Don Q, Son of Zorro in 1925, starring Douglas Fairbanks. He later attributed his decision to abandon directing to the persistent pressure from studio chiefs to hire their relatives, and his final film as director was The Runaway Bride in 1930.

Crisp's career was also shaped by military service. During the First World War he returned to the United Kingdom and served in British army intelligence. He became an American citizen in 1930, and during the Second World War he served in the United States Army Reserve, reaching the rank of colonel.

With the arrival of sound film, Crisp devoted himself entirely to acting. Through the 1930s and 1940s he appeared alongside many of the era's leading performers, including Katharine Hepburn in The Little Minister and A Woman Rebels, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty, Bette Davis and Henry Fonda in That Certain Woman and Jezebel, Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Sea Hawk, and Gregory Peck in The Valley of Decision. He also appeared in National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, and played Commander Beach in Lewis Allen's The Uninvited in 1944. His most celebrated performance came as the reserved but devoted father in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley in 1941, a film that received ten Academy Award nominations and won five, including Best Picture. For that role, Crisp won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1942.

Beyond his work on screen, Crisp was a significant figure in the financial infrastructure of the film industry. His background in business, the military, and entertainment made him a valued adviser to the Bank of America, one of the primary sources of working capital for Hollywood studios. He served on the bank's advisory board for several decades, including a period as its chairman, and many films financed by the bank during the 1930s and 1940s received critical support through his involvement.

Crisp continued acting through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, accumulating credits across as many as 400 or more productions over the course of his career. His final screen role was as Grandpa Spencer in the 1963 film Spencer's Mountain, alongside Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. That film, adapted from a novel by Earl Hamner, Jr., later served as the basis for the television series The Waltons. He was married three times: to actress Helen Pease in 1912, who died the following year; to Marie Stark in 1917, from whom he was divorced in 1920; and to screenwriter Jane Murfin in 1932, from whom he was divorced in 1944. Crisp died on 25 May 1974 from complications following a series of strokes, a few months before what would have been his 92nd birthday.