Philippe De Lacy

Philippe De Lacy (July 25, 1917 – July 29, 1995) was a French-born American actor who worked as a child performer in silent films and on Broadway before transitioning to a career as a film producer, director, and cinematographer.

De Lacy was born in France during World War I. His father had already died before his birth, and when De Lacy was only two days old, a German shell destroyed the family home, killing his mother and five siblings. He survived in the basement of his grandmother's house and was subsequently adopted by Edith De Lacy, a woman connected to the U.S. Women's Overseas Hospital. After the war, she brought him to the United States. His appearance led to work modeling for magazine advertisements, which in turn drew Hollywood's attention, and he appeared in his first film in a small role at age four. His early life story served as the basis for a fictional children's book, Little Philippe of Belgium, written by Madeline Brandeis as part of her "Children of the World" series.

Throughout the 1920s, De Lacy worked across multiple studios, though primarily for Paramount. In 1924 he played Michael Darling in the silent film adaptation of Peter Pan, starring Betty Bronson. At age ten he portrayed the young Don Juan in John Barrymore's Don Juan (1926). The following year he appeared in two notable productions: Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), in which he played the young prince Karl Heinrich alongside Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer, and Love (1927), an adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, in which he played Anna's son, Serezha Karenin. As the sound era took hold, De Lacy's career as a child actor declined, and he retired from the screen in the early 1930s.

During the period 1933 to 1934, De Lacy appeared on Broadway in two plays: Strangers at Home and Growing Pains.

In adulthood, De Lacy shifted his focus to the production side of filmmaking. He served as an assistant to director Louis De Rochemont on the 1940 film The Ramparts We Watch. In 1942 he received his first production credit as an editorial associate on We Are the Marines, a propaganda documentary made for the U.S. armed forces, narrated by radio and television announcer Westbrook Van Voorhis. In 1944 he worked as cinematographer on The Fighting Lady, a documentary filmed aboard the aircraft carrier Yorktown for the U.S. Navy, with narration provided by Robert Taylor, who held the rank of lieutenant in the navy at the time, and Charles Boyer, who supplied the French-language narration. The Fighting Lady won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1945. De Lacy went on to direct the television series The Buster Keaton Show in 1950 and also managed a local Hollywood television station. In 1955 he co-directed Cinerama Holiday with Robert L. Bendick, a documentary that performed well financially; the film was released on Blu-ray in 2013. De Lacy later became an executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, a position he held for more than 25 years.

De Lacy died of colon cancer on July 29, 1995, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, at the age of 78. His cremated remains were scattered at sea.