Guy Bates Post

Guy Bates Post (September 22, 1875 – January 16, 1968) was an American character actor born in Seattle, Washington, the first of two sons and a daughter in a family headed by John J. Post, a Canadian of English descent who partnered in the Seattle lumber firm Stetson and Post, and Mary Annette Ostrander, a Wisconsin native whose family had originally traveled west from New York. Post's sister, Madeline Post, also became an actress. He received his schooling in Seattle and later San Francisco before leaving college to pursue a career in the theatre.

Post made his professional stage debut in November 1894 at Chicago's Schiller Theatre, taking a minor role opposite Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter and Kyrle Bellew in Charlotte Corday. By May 1898 he had joined Otis Skinner's Company, where he met actress Sarah Truax, the troupe's leading lady, whom he married on April 18, 1897, at St. John's Episcopal Church in San Francisco while both were performing at the city's Baldwin Theatre. A significant early opportunity arrived in 1900 when Liebler and Company selected him to play David Brandon in a Southern American tour of Israel Zangwill's The Children of the Ghetto. Though the tour was brief, the role opened doors to further parts, including Rawdon Crowley in Langdon Miller's dramatization of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Lieutenant Denton in Augustus Thomas' Arizona, Robert Racket in Madeleine Lucette Ryley's My Lady Dainty, and Abbé Tiberge in Theodore Burt Sayre's dramatization of Manon Lescaut.

Post's Broadway career extended from 1901 to 1934, encompassing at least 21 productions. Among his notable stage credits were A Rose o' Plymouth-Town, The Bird in the Cage, The Marriage Game, and Hamlet. He achieved particular recognition as Captain Stuart in Augustus Thomas' Soldiers of Fortune in 1902, as Steve in Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian in 1904, and as Dean in Richard Walton Tully's Bird of Paradise in 1910. Two roles defined the peak of his stage career: Omar Khayyám in Richard Walton Tully's Omar the Tent Maker, which he first performed in 1914, and the dual roles of John Chilcote and John Loder in John Hunter Booth's The Masquerader, also from 1914, in which he accumulated over 1,500 performances across the production's run through 1917.

Post's film career began in 1922 with silent adaptations of both Omar the Tentmaker and The Masquerader, and continued for twenty-five years across approximately 25 Hollywood productions. He portrayed the Grand Lama in the 1936 serial Ace Drummond and Papa Bergelot in the 1937 serial The Mysterious Pilot. That same year he played Louis Napoleon in Maytime alongside John Barrymore, Jeanette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy, a role he reprised in the 1939 film The Mad Empress, which also featured Medea de Novara, Lionel Atwill, and Conrad Nagel. His final screen appearance came in A Double Life in 1947, in which he played an actor performing in a production of Shakespeare's Othello.

Post married four times. His first marriage to Sarah Truax ended in divorce approximately ten years after their 1897 wedding. In August 1907 he married Jane Peyton, born Jennie Van Norman, a fellow cast member from The Heir to the Hoorah tour; that marriage was annulled seven years later. On February 2, 1916, he married actress Adele Ritchie at a ceremony in Toronto held two days after Ritchie had obtained a divorce from her previous husband; the couple separated in 1926 and divorced three years later. Post's fourth marriage, to British actress Lillian Kemble-Cooper, took place on October 26, 1936, in Las Vegas. That union lasted more than thirty years and ended only with Post's death in Los Angeles on January 16, 1968, at the age of 92.