Noted for his air of mystery, expertise, and amazing beauty, director Rex Ingram (1893−1950) is ranked along D. W. Griffith, Marshall Neilan, and Erich von Stroheim as one of many maximum artists of the silent cinema. Ingram in short studied sculpture on the Yale college university of artwork after emigrating from eire to the U.S. in 1911; yet he was once quickly seduced by way of the hot medium of relocating photos and deserted his reviews for a sequence of jobs within the movie undefined. Over the following decade, he turned the most well known administrators in Hollywood, directing spoil hits equivalent to The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Prisoner of Zenda (1922), and Scaramouche (1923).

In Rex Ingram, Ruth Barton explores the existence and legacy of the pioneering filmmaker, following him from his early life in Dublin to his lifestyles on the most sensible of early Hollywood's A-list and his eventual self-imposed exile at the French Riviera. Ingram excelled in bringing visions of experience and fable to keen audiences, and his motion pictures made stars of actors like Rudolph Valentino, Ramón Novarro, and Alice Terry -- his moment spouse and top woman. together with his identify a digital warrantly of field workplace luck, Ingram's profession flourished within the Nineteen Twenties regardless of the limitations of an more and more regulated and the hostility of Louis B. Mayer, who looked him as a deadly maverick.

Barton examines the virtuoso director's profession and arguable own lifestyles -- together with his conversion to Islam, the rumors surrounding his ambiguous sexuality, and the situations of his premature dying. This definitive biography not just restores the visionary filmmaker to the highlight but in addition presents an soaking up examine the bold and exhilarating days of silent-era Hollywood.