Vernon Castle

Vernon Castle, born William Vernon Blyth on 2 May 1887 in Norwich, Norfolk, England, was a stage actor, dancer, and performer who became one of Broadway's most recognized figures in the early twentieth century. He initially trained to become a civil engineer before relocating to New York in 1906 alongside his sister, Coralie Blythe, and her husband, the actor Lawrence Grossmith. A small stage role arranged by Lew Fields launched his professional career, and he subsequently built a reputation as a comic actor, singer, dancer, and conjuror working under the stage name Vernon Castle. His signature comic specialty was the portrayal of a gentleman drunk, a character who moved with elegant precision while attempting to conceal his condition.

Castle's Broadway career spanned 1906 to 1914 and included appearances in The Girl Behind the Counter, The Mimic World (1908), The Hen-Pecks, The Lady of the Slipper, The Sunshine Girl (1913), and Watch Your Step (1914). It was in The Hen-Pecks (1911) that he first shared the stage with Irene Foote, whom he had married on 28 May 1911 in New Rochelle, New York. Irene had been born on 7 April 1893 in New Rochelle, the daughter of a physician, and had met Vernon at the New Rochelle Rowing Club in 1910. He helped secure her first professional engagement, a small dancing role in The Summer Widowers, before she joined him in The Hen-Pecks.

Following their marriage, the couple traveled to Paris to perform in a dance revue. When that production closed quickly, they were engaged as a dance act at the Café de Paris in Monaco, where they performed American ragtime dances including the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear. Their success in Parisian society was widely covered in the American press, and upon returning to New York in 1912 they made their debut at a branch of the Café de Paris operated by Louis Martin. The Castles rapidly became fixtures of Broadway, vaudeville, and motion pictures, and together they are credited with reviving the popularity of modern social dancing and helping to bring ragtime, jazz rhythms, and African-American music to wider audiences.

The peak of their joint celebrity came with Watch Your Step (1914), which featured Irving Berlin's first Broadway score and was written specifically for the Castles. In that production the couple refined and popularized the foxtrot, and the show subsequently toured through 1916. Also in 1914, the Castles opened a dancing school in New York called Castle House, a nightclub called Castles by the Sea on the Boardwalk in Long Beach, New York, and a restaurant called Sans Souci. At Castle House they taught society clients the latest dance steps and performed at their club and café in the evenings. That same year they appeared in a newsreel titled Social and Theatrical Dancing and co-authored the bestselling instructional book Modern Dancing. In 1915 they starred together in the feature film The Whirl of Life. The pair traveled with James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra, a black ensemble, and endorsed Victor Records and Victrolas, issuing recordings by the Castle House Orchestra under Europe's direction.

In 1915, Castle left the touring company of Watch Your Step to begin flight training in the United States, receiving his pilot's certificate in early 1916. He and Irene gave two farewell performances at the Hippodrome Theatre in New York in January 1916, with John Philip Sousa and his band in attendance. Castle then sailed for England and enlisted as a pilot in the British Royal Flying Corps. Flying over the Western Front, he completed 300 combat missions, shot down two aircraft, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917. He was subsequently promoted to captain and transferred to Camp Mohawk in Ontario, Canada, to train new pilots, before his unit was moved to Camp Taliaferro in the United States for winter training.

On 15 February 1918, Castle was piloting a plane over Benbrook Field, a training base near Fort Worth, Texas, when he took emergency action shortly after takeoff to avoid a collision with another aircraft. His plane stalled, and he was unable to regain control before it struck the ground. He died that day at the age of thirty. In 1939, the life he and Irene had shared was dramatized in the film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.