OLD ACTOR’S DEATH

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 922, 15 March 1930, Page 10

OLD ACTOR’S DEATH

WHILE FELLOW-PLAYERS DIG GRAVE SCREEN DRAMA CLIMAX Men dug a grave at Liverpool, near Sydney, recently, and " a girl wept above the broken earth. None of them cared, for no one was buried there; the tears that fell were the glycerine tears of an actress, and the father she mourned was a character in a screeri-play. And none of them knew that the pretended father, in real life Daniel Dalziel, just then lay dying in Sydney Hospital, says the Sydney' “Daily Guardian.” The film was one being made by a local firm for the Commonwealth Government £5,000 prize contest. Dalziel, a well-known Sydney actor, was cast as the father of the heroine, and had played in numerous scenes with her at the Sydney studio. White-haired and sensitive, he suited perfectly the role of the old man. cared for by* his daughter, struggling against the illness that finally kills him. He was a fine actor, and his por trayal of tragedy* had an almost eerie reality*. He was to act again that battle with looming death—and with a grimmer reality. In a smash in Sydney' his skull was fractured, and. taken to hospital, he clung to life until late in the afternoon. Then, as his comrades of the shadow world dug his sham grave at distant Liverpool, the old actor closed his eyes and passed to another world whose shadows move only* on the j screen of memory.