SUNG HIS WAY TO FILM FAME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1939, Page 4

SUNG HIS WAY TO FILM FAME

BATHTUB TUNE WON CRISP RECOGNITION. Ladies don’t reprove your husband or male kinfolk for singing in the bathtub! You never can tell what the combination of melody and rushing water might lead to. Maybe fame. Maybe wealth. Maybe both. Such was the case with Donald Crisp, the distinguished Hollywood character actor. A mixture of an aria and a showerbath got him started. Crisp told the story one day when he was reminiscing between scenes of "Valley of the Giants,” the Warner Bros.’ technicolour production now playing in New Zealand. The tale begins in 1906, when he was in London, to which city his parents brought him from his Scottish birthplace. “Our newspapers were filled with graphic accounts of the terrible San Francisco earthquake of that year," he explained, “and I was immensely interested in it., I said to myself, ‘l’ll go over to the States and have a look at that city.’ I was a youngster with no particular aim in life, and loved

adventure, so I started off, but didn’t get to San Francisco for quite a number of years. “In my New York hotel I was fascinated by the showerbath. A great invention. I’d never seen one in England. So after ordering breakfast, I got under the stream and unconsciously began to sing. The waiter who brought up my tray heard me and spoke about me to another guest in the hotel—John C. Fisher, head of the Fisher-Riley Opera Company. Mr Fisher called on me, I sang for him, and two days later was on my way to Havana as stage manager of the troupe, later becoming the tenor lead.” When the tour of the Opera Company was over two years later, Donald Crisp got a job as an actor with the Biograph Company, which was making those new-fangled movies. And he has been in the motion picture business ever since alternately as a director and actor.