Richard Dix

Richard Dix, born Ernst Carlton Brimmer on July 18, 1893, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was an American stage and motion picture actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1914 to 1919 before he became a prominent figure in both silent and sound Hollywood film. He died on September 20, 1949, at the age of 56.

Raised in Saint Paul, Dix received his schooling there with an initial intention of pursuing surgery to satisfy his father's wishes. At six feet tall and 180 pounds, he was an accomplished athlete, particularly in football and baseball, but his participation in his school's dramatic club revealed a talent for performance that drew him toward leading roles in school productions. After one year at the University of Minnesota, he took a position at a bank while training for the stage in the evenings. His professional career began with a local stock company, which led to comparable work in New York City. He subsequently relocated to Los Angeles, where he served as leading man for the Morosco Stock Company. That success secured him a contract with Paramount Pictures, at which point Brimmer adopted the professional name Richard Dix.

During his Broadway years, Dix appeared in four productions: First is Last, I Love You, A Little Brother of the Rich, and The Hawk. Following his transition to Hollywood, he began his film career in dramas and romantic comedies at Paramount. His first Western came in 1923 with To the Last Man, his seventeenth picture, and was immediately followed by a prominent early role in Cecil B. DeMille's silent production of The Ten Commandments. Dix proved capable of navigating the industry's shift from silent film to sound, sustaining his status as a leading man into the talkie era. His most celebrated screen performance came in RKO's 1931 epic Cimarron, an adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel in which he played Yancey Cravat. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Dix received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed that film with another RKO production, the adventure The Lost Squadron.

Alcoholism undermined Dix's ability to maintain leading man status, and his career gradually shifted toward B pictures. He appeared in the 1935 British futuristic film The Tunnel, as well as The Great Jasper and Blind Alibi in the late 1930s. He portrayed Wild Bill Hickok in the 1941 film Badlands of Dakota and played Wyatt Earp the following year in Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die. He also starred as the homicidal Captain Stone in the Val Lewton production The Ghost Ship. Beginning in 1944, Dix headlined The Whistler, a Columbia Pictures series based on a popular radio program, in which he played a range of characters — some sympathetic, others hard-boiled — all subject to conspiring circumstances. He did not portray the unseen narrator figure of the Whistler himself. Dix retired from acting after completing the seventh film in the series, The Thirteenth Hour, bringing his total screen appearances to 101 credited roles.

In the 1944 United States presidential election, Dix supported Thomas Dewey. He suffered a heart attack in October 1948 and experienced continued cardiac difficulties in the months that followed. On September 12, 1949, he suffered a serious heart attack, reportedly either aboard a train traveling from New York to Los Angeles or on a ship returning from France. He died eight days later at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Dix is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the Motion Pictures section at 1610 Vine Street, dedicated on February 8, 1960.