Douglas Fairbanks

Book excerpt: Few people have influenced Hollywood history than Douglas Fairbanks. And who better than his niece and Fairbanks family historian, Letitia, to relate that story? On-screen and offscreen, he was a force of nature, progressing in easy leaps and bounds from the Broadway stage to silent movies when feature-length film was just a few years old. His happy, healthy characters and acrobatic acting style brought a new energy to the medium. But it was through his extraordinary success as a producer that Fairbanks achieved the goal of all creative people: to run his own show. This he did by co-founding United Artists in 1919 with his soon-to-be wife Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. As a producer, he showed visionary taste, collaborating with his directors and designers to enact gallant tales in spectacular settings. Whether he played a young man on the go or a swashbuckling hero in a fairy-tale land, Fairbanks—one of the thirty-six founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—put America’s hopes and dreams on film. This updated version of the original 1953 biography has been expanded by the Fairbanks family with archival materials as well as never-before-seen photographs from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.