Albert Parker | |
---|---|
Born | New York City | May 11, 1885
Died | August 10, 1974 London, England | (aged 89)
Occupation | Film director |
Years active | 1917–38 |
Spouse | Margaret Johnston (1946–74) |
Albert Parker (May 11, 1885 – August 10, 1974) was born in New York City and died in London, England. He was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and actor and directed 36 films between 1917 and 1938. In the early 1930s Parker left Hollywood for England where he continued to direct films and following this opened his actors' agency and talent office, Al Parker Ltd. In 1946 he married the Australian born British actress Margaret Johnston. His primary and favored client when opening Al Parker Ltd. was James Mason. To name but two other of the distinguished actors he nurtured under his management, Jack Hawkins and Virginia McKenna, while one of his later clients in the 1960s was the young actress Helen Mirren.
extract: James Mason: A Bio-bibliography By Kevin Sweeney
- Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999 _ P.8
Al Parker was a many-talented American jack-of-all-trades who had been an actor before discovering Rudolph Valentino and directing The Black Pirate (1926), a Technicolor marvel starring Douglas Fairbanks. When his directing career was jeopardized by the Depression, Parker made screen tests for 20th Century-Fox. Then in the early 1930s Parker left Hollywood for England.
While casting a picture in England, he fell in love with the country, decided to stay, and convinced Fox to let him set up a small studio in North London to crank out inexpensive B films. They were called "quota quickies" because they satisfied a law that a certain percentage of films shown in U.K. theaters had to be U.K. in origin. Parker truly loved the business and tried to turn out the best product possible, even given his schedule of two a month, the low budgets, and the lack of enthusiasm from the U.S. home office.
This was the man who "discovered" James Mason. At a party, Parker noticed Mason across the room and immediately saw movie potential, though Mason, after an humiliating experience on his previous and first dip into motion pictures, wasn't at all sure he wanted to be discovered. But Parker was persuasive; within a few days, the actor had submitted to a screen test, allowed Parker to get him out of a contract with the agent who had already snagged him, signed a long-term pact with Fox British, and was learning the script of his first film assignment, directed by Parker, Late Extra (1935).[1]
Selected filmography
- American Aristocracy (1916) (*as actor)
- Her Excellency, the Governor (1917)
- Shifting Sands (1918)
- The Secret Code (1918)
- Arizona (1918)
- The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919)
- Eyes of Youth (1919)
- The Branded Woman (1920)
- Sherlock Holmes (1922)
- Second Youth (1924)
- The Rejected Woman (1924)
- The Black Pirate (1926)
- The Love of Sunya (1927)
- The Right to Live (1932)
- After Dark (1932)
- Rolling in Money (1934)
- The Third Clue (1934)
- The Riverside Murder (1935)
- The White Lilac (1935)
- Late Extra (1935)
- Blind Man's Bluff (1936)
- Troubled Waters (1936)
- There Was a Young Man (1937)
- The Five Pound Man (1937)
- Strange Experiment (1937)
- Second Thoughts (1938)
- Murder in the Family (1938)
External links
References
- ^ James Mason: A Bio-bibliography By Kevin Sweeney; Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport CT, 1999.
ISBN 0-313-28496-2 ; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-45005