Paul Dickey

Paul Dickey (May 12, 1883 – January 8, 1933) was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, and director, as well as an early aviator, born in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Frank H. Dickey, was a New York-born lawyer who later became a judge and co-founded a small bank in the Chicago area. Dickey's mother, originally from Wisconsin, died during his childhood, and he was raised alongside two older brothers and a younger sister by his father and paternal aunt, Isabel Dickey.

At South Division High School in Chicago, Dickey participated in boxing, track, football, and dramatics. He won the pole vault and long jump at a YMCA athletic meet and was part of a relay team from South Division that claimed a Chicago-wide interscholastic championship. After graduating in June 1902, he was recruited by both the University of Chicago under Amos Alonzo Stagg and the University of Michigan under Fielding Yost, ultimately choosing Michigan. There he played substitute left halfback on the varsity football squad as a freshman, pledged Delta Upsilon fraternity, sang bass with the Men's Glee Club, and joined the University's Comedy Club. He also competed on Michigan's track and field team in the spring of 1903. A prolonged bout of typhoid fever in his sophomore year, followed by an attack of appendicitis, ended his athletic career and cost him academic credit for 1903–1904. He returned to Michigan for another year and a half, concentrating on dramatics, before leaving college in May 1906 to pursue a career in vaudeville.

Dickey launched his vaudeville career with a solo act of stage celebrity impressions, which was considered a novelty at the time. Traveling a circuit from the West to New York City, he joined Robert Edeson's touring company for Strongheart in August 1906. The four-act play by William C. DeMille centered on a Native American athlete at Columbia University navigating racial prejudice while leading the football team to victory. Dickey remained with the production through April 1907, receiving a larger role when it traveled to London's Aldwych Theatre in May 1907. After the tour returned to America, Edgar Selwyn took over the lead, and Dickey continued in a supporting capacity when the production opened in Chicago in August 1907, with the tour concluding in Poughkeepsie, New York on March 30, 1908.

In the summer of 1908, Dickey wrote a one-act play called The Counterfeit Champion and joined the Paul McAllister Stock Company at Hurtig and Seamon's Music Hall in Harlem. Henry B. Harris, who had directed him in Strongheart, then cast him in Pierre of the Plains, again opposite Edgar Selwyn, who had adapted the work from stories by Canadian author Gilbert Parker. The production tried out in Pittston, Pennsylvania on September 19, 1908, before runs in Toronto and Montreal, and opened on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre on October 12, 1908, marking Dickey's Broadway debut. As the villain Jap Durgan, he engaged in a bowie knife fight with the protagonist before being stabbed and falling eighteen feet down a steep incline. The stunt drew widespread press attention, and Harris took out an insurance policy on Dickey given the physical risk involved. In Montreal, a fall gone wrong sent Dickey to the hospital; he was injured again on the second night of the Broadway run but managed to continue performing. Dickey attributed the stunt's success to his football experience in falling and the use of padding.

It was during the run of Pierre of the Plains that Dickey met journalist Charles W. Goddard from Portland, Maine, after the two clashed over a room in a Manhattan boarding house on 46th Street. Following a night of argument, they became friends, and Dickey recognized the dramatic potential in a scenario Goddard had written called The Ghost Breaker. The two spent several months expanding it into a four-act melodramatic farce. From late March 1909, Dickey appeared on Broadway as leading man opposite Henrietta Crosman in Sham, a comedy by Geraldine Bonner and Elmer Harris, in which he played a western man courting a penniless society woman. While touring with Sham, he and Goddard sold The Ghost Breaker to producer Henry B. Harris, though Harris eventually returned the manuscript unproduced. Dickey then arranged a low-budget tryout for the play at Olentangy Park Theatre in Columbus, Ohio in the summer of 1910, financing it himself and playing the lead. During one performance, he was nearly killed by a sword, an incident that generated national publicity. He and Goddard also produced a one-act play in Columbus called The Man from the Sea, a playlet involving wireless telegraphy, a love triangle, and a ghost story, which Dickey subsequently performed in vaudeville in the fall of 1910 under the sponsorship of Maurice Campbell.

The Ghost Breaker eventually reached Broadway and became one of Dickey's most recognized credits, an early work in the comedy horror genre. His collaboration with Goddard also produced The Misleading Lady, which popularized the Napoleon imposter trope on stage. Among his other Broadway credits were The Backslapper, The Dust Heap, Broken Wings, and Lights Out. Dickey also gave George Abbott his first Broadway role at a moment when Abbott was prepared to leave the theater entirely.

During World War I, Dickey enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in France as an officer with a bomber squadron. After the war, he transitioned into silent film, working as both a writer and director. He played the villain opposite Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood and directed the long-running musical Rose-Marie. His Broadway activity continued into 1920, and his stage career spanned from 1908 to that year. Recurring heart trouble increasingly limited his performing work in his later years, shifting his focus toward writing and directing. Dickey died of a heart attack on January 8, 1933, at the age of 49.