Warner Baxter(1889-1951)
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Warner Baxter claimed to have an early pre-disposition toward show
business: "I discovered a boy a block away who would eat worms and
swallow flies for a penny. For one-third of the profits, I exhibited
him in a tent." When he was age 9, his widowed mother moved to San
Francisco where, following the earthquake of 1906, his family lived in
a tent for two weeks "in mortal terror of the fire." By 1910 he was in
vaudeville and from there went on to Broadway plays and movies. A
matinée idol in the silents, he came to prominence as the Cisco Kid
with In Old Arizona (1928), for
which he won an Oscar. He went on to star with
Myrna Loy in
Penthouse (1933) and to what many
consider his best role, that of the doctor who treated
Abraham Lincoln's assassin, in
The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936).
That year his $284,000 income topped the industry. In 1943, after
slipping into a string of B-pictures, he began his Dr. Ordway "Crime
Doctor" series with
Crime Doctor (1943). He had suffered
a nervous breakdown, and these pictures were easy on him (studio sets
for one month, two films a year). Following a lobotomy to relieve pains
of arthritis, he died of pneumonia.
