CANNOT BE SERIOUS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 176, 15 October 1927, Page 25 (Supplement)

CANNOT BE SERIOUS

FORTUNE IN FACE TWO WOULD-BE “TRAGEDIANS” There is tragedy as well as fortune in a funny face. Just after the war, George K. Arthur, after trying to make a living on the London stage.

where he had been playing small Shakespearean parts in a Benson Company, went to America. He wanted to become a film tragedian. In this, his face was against him. Nobody wanted a serious young lead, and poor George K. Arthur became sadder and sadder, and hungrier and hungrier. One of his first parts was in “The Salvation Hunters,” a gloomy film about a starving couple on a mud dredger. He was starving before making the picture, and starving afterwards, until somebody detected the making of a comedian in him and offered him a small part. Since then Arthur has become funnier and funnier on the screen, and now he is paired as a star comedian with a young Lane, who likewise went to America to put over Shakespeare. Karl Dane was born in a theatre in Copenhagen, and after the war he, too, arrived in America looking for a job. This soon turned him into a very gloomy Dane indeed. One day, when he was standing in a queue, his face looked so lugubrious that someone decided it was the most comic thing that had ever come into the studio. The result was several funny parts, in which Dane let his rubber face slip all over the screen. It would be difficult to find a more amusing pair than Dane and Arthur. The sad part is that they both wanted to be serious actors, and have “arrived” as comedians.