Walter Huston

Walter Huston was a Canadian actor and singer born on April 6, 1883, in Toronto, Ontario, where he attended Winchester Street Public School. He was the son of Elizabeth (née McGibbon) and Robert Moore Huston, a farmer who later founded a construction company, and was of Scottish and Irish descent. Among his siblings was Margaret Carrington (1877–1941), a theatrical voice coach. His family had relocated to Toronto from Melville, near Orangeville, Ontario, where they had worked as farmers.

As a young man, Huston worked in construction while studying at the Shaw School of Acting in his spare time. He made his stage debut in 1902 and subsequently toured in In Convict Stripes, a play by Hal Reid, and appeared alongside Richard Mansfield in Julius Caesar, as well as touring in The Sign of the Cross. In 1904, he married Rhea Gore (1882–1938), a sports editor, and stepped away from acting to manage electric power stations in Nevada, Missouri, a position he held until 1909. The couple's only child, John Huston, was born on August 5, 1906, in Nevada, Missouri.

With his first marriage deteriorating, Huston began performing in 1909 alongside an older actress named Bayonne Whipple, born Mina Rose (1865–1937), and the two were billed as Whipple and Huston. He and Rhea Gore divorced in 1913, and in December 1914 he married Mina Rose. The pair sustained themselves through vaudeville work into the 1920s, during which time John Huston was enrolled in boarding schools, spending summers traveling separately with each parent. Huston and Mina Rose divorced in 1931, and that same year he married Ninetta (Nan) Sunderland, who remained his wife until his death.

Huston launched his Broadway career on January 22, 1924, with a performance in Mr. Pitt, and went on to appear in a range of productions over the following two decades, including Desire Under the Elms, Kongo, The Barker, Elmer the Great, and The Commodore Marries. He starred in the 1934 Broadway adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth, playing the title character Sam Dodsworth, and later reprised the role in the film version released two years later. For that screen performance, he received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and an Academy Award nomination. In 1938, he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday, a recording of which was later featured repeatedly in the 1950 film September Affair. His Broadway appearances continued through 1946, with credits also including Apple of His Eye.

Once sound films became the industry standard, Huston transitioned to Hollywood, taking on both leading and character roles. His first major sound film role was the villainous Trampas in the 1929 Western The Virginian, which also starred Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen. He followed that with portrayals of Abraham Lincoln (1930), and roles in Rain (1932) and Gabriel Over the White House (1933). He made an uncredited appearance in the 1941 film noir The Maltese Falcon, directed by his son John, playing the ship's captain who is shot while delivering the black bird to Sam Spade. During filming, John Huston directed his father through more than ten takes of the death scene as a practical joke.

During World War II, Huston contributed to several Allied propaganda efforts. He appeared in an uncredited role as a military instructor in the short film Safeguarding Military Information (1942), produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and distributed by the War Activities Committee of the Motion Pictures Industry. He also served as a narrator, alongside Anthony Veiller, in Frank Capra's Why We Fight documentary series. Other wartime films included The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), in which he played Mr. Scratch, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Mission to Moscow (1943), where he portrayed United States Ambassador Joseph E. Davies.

Huston's most celebrated screen performance came in the 1948 adventure drama The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, again directed by John Huston and based on the novel by B. Traven. He played the character Howard, one of three gold prospectors in post-revolution Mexico during the 1920s. For the role, Huston won both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, while John Huston won the Academy Award for Best Director, making them the first father and son to win Oscars at the same ceremony. His final film was The Furies (1950), a Western in which he co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck and Wendell Corey.

Huston died on April 7, 1950, one day after his sixty-seventh birthday, from an aortic aneurysm in his hotel suite in Beverly Hills. He was cremated. A decade after his death, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard. He was also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. Huston is regarded as the patriarch of four generations of the Huston acting family, which includes his son John, grandchildren Anjelica Huston and Danny Huston, and great-grandchild Jack Huston. In 1998, Scarecrow Press published John Weld's September Song: An Intimate Biography of Walter Huston.