Warren William Pics

Warren

William

Aitkin, Minnesota

Sagittarius

24 September 1948

Hollywood, California

multiple myeloma

White

Male

American

02/12/1894

Slim

Http://www.whosdatedwho.com/photo/gallery.asp?PG=1&RD=51366&RT=Warren%20William

Warren William (December 2, 1894 – September 24, 1948) was a Broadway and Hollywood actor, popular during the early 1930s, who was later nicknamed the "king of Pre-Code". born the son of Freeman E. and Frances Krech, as Warren William Krech in Aitkin, Minnesota. He had a certain physical resemblance to John Barrymore. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After moving from Broadway to Hollywood in 1931, he reached his peak as a leading man in early 1930s pre-Production Code films. He was a contract player at the Warner Bros. studio and was known for portraying amoral businessmen, lawyers, and other heartless types, including the Sam Spade character (renamed "Ted Shane") in the second filming of The Maltese Falcon, called Satan Met a Lady (1936) with Bette Davis.

Warren William, the stalwart leading man of pre-Production Code talkies, was born Warren William Krech on December 2, 1894 in Aitkin, Minnesota, the son of a newspaper publisher. William originally planned to become a journalist, but he had a change of heart, and instead went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and trained to become an actor. He served in the military in France during World War I, remaining in that country after the Armistice to tour with a theatrical company. He made his Broadway debut as William Warren in the H.G. Wells play "The Wonderful Visit" in 1924. While appearing in 17 more plays on Broadway from 1924 to 1930, he also managed to appear in three silent pictures under his own name, Warren Krech. His only substantial role was in his first flicker, Fox`s The Town That Forgot God (1922). In 1923, he played a credited bit part in support of "Perils of Pauline" star Pearl White in her last serial photoplay, Plunder (1923) but he went uncredited in a bit part in the Roaring Twenties/John Gilbert-as-bootlegger movie, Twelve Miles Out (1927). Possessed of a first-rate speaking voice, rich, deep, and mellifluous, he was a natural for the talkies, and in 1931, he joined the stock company at Warner Bros., the studio that gave the world cinema sound. Projecting a patrician persona, Warren William initially thrived in the all-talking pictures. He appeared in a lead role in his first talkie, Honor of the Family (1931), an adaptation Honoré de Balzac`s novel "Cousin Pons." Subsequently, he appeared as second leads and leads in support of the likes of Dolores Costello (Drew Barrymore`s grandmother), H.B. Warner, Walter Huston, and Marian Marsh, before headlining The Mouthpiece (1932) as a district attorney who quits for the other side of the law, defending mobsters before a last reel conversion back to truth, justice, and the All-American Way. It was his break-through role, followed up by a turn as a crooked campaign manager with more than just the affairs of state on his mind in The Dark Horse (1932). He then moved on to leading roles in A-list pictures, including the high-suds soap opera Three on a Match (1932), the classic musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Frank Capra`s Lady for a Day (1933), and the original Imitation of Life (1934) starring Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers. William was typecast as an amoral, aggressive rogue without a conscience, often playing unscrupulous lawyers, heartless businessmen, and just-plain cads. When a Warner`s script called for a hard-hearted seducer with a calloused exterior masking an even-more-calloused soul, it was William who was cast in the part. His characters had little sense of decency, and even less self-doubt. Always outwardly charming, his unsympathetic rogues wrecked many screen lives among Warners` ingénues. His outstanding performances in these roles include Skyscraper Souls (1932), The Match King (1932), and Employees` Entrance (1933). He also broadened his range to play the fraudulent clairvoyant in The Mind Reader (1933). It was the Great Depression, and audiences were rooting against businessmen, who in real life preached Christian values, but who on-screen in the pre-Code days were portrayed as the predators that the out-of-work and anxiously employed knew them in their hearts to be. The antipathy of the movie mob also extended to the professional class, particularly lawyers, another type that William excelled at portraying. In late 1932, as William`s popularity on the screen soared, Franklin Delano Roosevelt swamped the hapless Herbert Hoover in an electoral landslide. During this, the apogee of William`s career, he appeared opposite strong female stars, including Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak and Loretta Young. Thomas Doherty, in his book "Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), claims that the films made in Warren Williams` heyday exposed the fissures in society with all their "rougher edges and sharper points. What is concealed, subterranean and repressed in Hollywood under the Code leaps out exposed, on the surface, unbound in Hollywood before the Code." Williams` unsympathetic rogues were a hallmark of pre-Code cinema, his cunning and predatory amorality a leitmotif of a cinema responding to the despair engendered by an unprecedented economic calamity. From 1929 to 1933, industrial production was halved, disposable incomes declined by 28%, stock prices fell to one-tenth their pre-Crash height, and the numbers of the unemployed rose from 1.6 million to 12.8 million. With his patrician looks and bearing, William was loaned out to Cecil B. DeMille to play the patrician`s patrician, Julius Caesar, again opposite of Ms. Colbert in Cleopatra (1934), a typical prodigal DeMille production in which Henry Wilcoxon avenged his mentor`s assassination by rousin

Warren William Krech

Freeman E. Krech

Frances Krech

Jack (Dog - wire-haired terrier. Warren taught the dog to drink from a straw)

Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-code Hollywood [2010] (John Stangeland)

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