LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Wilfred Lucas
built 630 days ago
From All Movie Guide: Virile, dignified Canadian actor Wilfred Lucas was a stage veteran when he joined the Biograph movie company in 1907. He played a variety of leading roles in the films of D.W. Griffith, including the title character in Griffith's two-reel adaptation of Enoch Arden. Occasionally turning director himself, Lucas was especially busy in this capacity at the Keystone studios of Mack Sennett. During the 1920s, Lucas played several character roles in major productions and ... kept busy as a director and screenwriter. In the talkie era, Wilfred Lucas played innumerable bit parts at Warner Bros., Hal Roach Studios and Paramount; he could occasionally be seen in sizeable roles in such films as Laurel and Hardy's Pardon Us (1931) and A Chump at Oxford (1940), and director James Cruze's I Cover the Waterfront (1933).
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Wilfred Lucas was one of the fortunate ones whose skills and voice allowed him to make the successful transition from silent film to sound. While working in Hollywood, in 1926 he returned to the stage, performing in several Broadway plays.He later appeared as a foil for Laurel and Hardy,in their feature films Pardon Us and A Chump at Oxford.
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W[I]lfred Lucas had all the charm and bearing of the almost stereotypical young sophisticate at the end of the 1890s. He left Canada to persue an acting career in New York and made his Broadway debut at the Savoy Theater in 1904 appearing in The Superstition of Sue. He was highly successful in the 1906 play, The Chorus Lady and was approached to join D. W. Griffith at the Biograph movie company in 1907. He worked with some of the greatest silent actors of the day including Mary Pickford. He ... appeared in Griffiths' monumental and controversial film, Intolerance. Lucas also tried his hand at screenwriting and directing and survived the transition into "talkies" in a career that spanned 32 remarkable years and 375 films.
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In 1908, Wilfred Lucas made his motion picture debut in Griffith's production, The Greaser's Gauntlet. He appeared in more than fifty of these short films (usually 17 minutes) over the next two years and in 1910, while still acting, he wrote the script for Griffith's film Sunshine Sue which was followed by many more scripts between then and 1924. Lucas ... began directing in 1912, first with Griffith on An Outcast Among Outcasts, and during the ensuing twenty years directed another 44 films. In 1916, Lucas appeared in Griffith’s film, Intolerance, a monumental project regarded by many as the most spectacular film of all time.
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Wilfred Lucas plays a distinguished banker, falsely accused of murder. Though acquitted in court, Lucas' reputation is destroyed, and he force from his job. Like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, Lucas decides that he's worth more dead than alive; ... he plans to kill himself so his family can collect his life insurance. Also like George Bailey, he is saved from this fate at the very last minute. With only one reel left, everyone puts in overtime to rush through a happy ending. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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Part of the group of Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood, Lucas became friends and sometimes starred with Mary Pickford, Sam De Grasse, and Marie Dressler. Canadian born director Mack Sennett hired him to both direct and act in a large number of films at his Keystone Studios.
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