Donald Gallaher

Donald Gallaher (June 25, 1895 – August 14, 1961) was an American actor, book writer, film director, and producer born in Quincy, Illinois. After relocating to New York City as a child with his mother, he began performing at a remarkably early age, accumulating ten stage roles before his twelfth birthday.

Gallaher's acting career began when he was four years old, making his debut as Rip in Sol Smith Russell's production of Poor Relations. His early stage work included productions such as A Royal Family. At fifteen, he stepped away from performing for two years to pitch semi-professional baseball on Long Island, returning to the stage at seventeen. His Broadway career spanned from 1900 to 1933 and encompassed productions including Sh, the Octopus, The World Waits, Back Fire, The Golden Age, and Salvation, among others.

His screen career ran parallel to his stage work. He appeared in the silent film The Great Train Robbery in 1903 and later took a bit part in the 23-chapter serial The Million Dollar Mystery in 1914. In 1923, he co-starred with Louis Wolheim and Una Merkel in the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, which was filmed using Lee De Forest's Phonofilm sound-on-film process. Over the course of his film career, Gallaher appeared in 25 films between 1903 and 1949, with credits including Eye for Eye (1918), Married in Hollywood (1929), Pleasure Crazed (1929), Six-Gun Trail (1938), Outlaws' Paradise (1939), Code of the Fearless (1939), and The Magnificent Fraud (1939).

Beyond performing, Gallaher directed five films, among them Nix on Dames (1929), Temple Tower (1930), June First (1931), and The Hot Spot (1931). He also produced Broadway plays later in his career. In 1949, working under the name Don Gallagher, he served as narrator of the ABC Television Players, a short-lived dramatic anthology series broadcast from Chicago. His name is sometimes misspelled as "Gallagher."

In his personal life, Gallaher married actress Beatrice Noyes on April 13, 1917. The couple had a son, Donald Gallaher Jr., before divorcing on April 1, 1921. On December 1, 1923, shortly after his divorce from Grace Martin Hannon became final, he married Adele Wormser in Boston.