Charles Meredith (August 27, 1894November 28, 1964)Charles H Meredith in the California, U.S., Death Index, 1940–1997, retrieved from Ancestry.com was an American stage, film, and television actor, who also directed plays and taught in college drama departments. His screen career came in two widely separated phases: as a leading man for silent films in the early 1920s, and as a character actor for films and television from 1947 through 1964. He was a series regular on television shows Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and The Court of Last Resort.
Early life Charles Howard Meredith was born in Knoxville,This is not the Knoxville, Pennsylvania in Tioga County. a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 for Charles Howard Meredith, retrieved from Ancestry.com He was the second of four children for Benjamin Franklin Meredith, a school teacher, and his wife Rosabel Fleming, a daughter of English immigrants.1900 United States Federal Census for Charles H Meredith, Pennsylvania > Allegheny > Turtle Creek > District 0512, retrieved from Ancestry.com1910 United States Federal Census for Charles H Meredith, Pennsylvania > Allegheny > Pittsburgh Ward 4 > District 0322, retrieved from Ancestry.com As a child he attended Belleville School in Oakland, Pittsburgh through the eighth grade, then Pittsburgh High School where he ran track and graduated from the academic curriculum during June 1912.
College and early stage career Meredith attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he was a student in the Drama department for the School of Applied Design. At the start of his first year he was in a professional production of Salvation Nell at the Pitt Theater in Pittsburgh, his first known stage credit. While at Carnegie, Meredith was active in performing student productions. He also acted as assistant to the department head in staging both college plays and outside special events. According to his 1964 obituary notice in The New York Times and to columnist Kaspar Monahan in The Pittsburgh Press, Meredith earned an M.A. degree at Carnegie.While Meredith's activities at Carnegie are well documented in local newspapers for the years 1914-1916, his name is not in any of the graduate lists published each June. A 1919 Pittsburgh newspaper account after his first motion pictures reached that city mentions he spent three years at Carnegie, but says nothing about a degree.
After college, Meredith joined the road company for the Washington Square Players (WSP), performing its repertory of one-act plays alongside Sam Jaffe and Ralph Roeder. He then had a major role in a two-act play, Plots and Playwrights, staged by the WSP at the Comedy Theatre, which also featured Katharine Cornell and Helen Westley. Meredith returned to Pittsburgh for a play in October 1917, but went back to New York in early 1918 for a series of short-lived Broadway productions. First up was the debut of "an odd new comedy" called April by Hubert Osborne, followed by Her Honor, the Mayor, and in June 1918, The Best Sellers, which amused Heywood Broun in his review. Meredith's final Broadway play for seven years came in August 1918, with Allegiance.
West Coast and silent films Morosco Players Meredith left New York in November 1918 to join the Morosco Players in Los Angeles as their new leading man.Their previous leading man, Charles Gunn, was leaving to fulfill a movie contract but soon died in the Spanish flu pandemic. He received acclaim from the Los Angeles Times for stepping into the lead role of Pals First with just two days notice. By May 1919 he had performed the male lead in seven productions at the Morosco Theatre when he was signed by King Vidor to support his wife Florence Vidor in films.
King Vidor films The Other Half was third of a series of Christian Science-themed films King Vidor made for Brentwood Film Corporation. Meredith's parents had been Christian Science practitioners; whether that played any role in his casting is unknown. The Los Angeles Times said the four principals, Florence Vidor, Meredith, ZaSu Pitts, and David Butler, would play characters representing "the Classes" and "the Masses". Filming completed in July 1919, even as Sheldon Johnson was working on the scenario for the next Vidor-Brentwood collaboration.
In between filmings, Meredith decided to join another stage company, taking part in one-act plays with Neely Dickson's Hollywood Community Theater.
The Other Half was in Eastern cinema houses by September, and in Los Angeles by October. For both coasts, the female leads drew the attention of reviewers, in part because the film publicity emphasized them. However, the Los Angeles Times reviewer acknowledged Meredith's "dramatic excellence" in an ill-defined role. Meredith's second Vidor film Poor Relations was released in November 1919. Pittsburgh newspapers recognized him as a hometown boy and reported on his career.
The Family Honor, released in March 1920, was Meredith's last film for King Vidor, though he would later make other pictures with Florence Vidor. It was made by Vidor's own production company in conjunction with First National Film Distributors,. Two Los Angeles reviewers were mildly critical of Meredith's character, reporting that it wasn't quite convincing, though well-acted.
Famous Players–Lasky Meredith had signed in June 1919 to support Marguerite Clark, then working with Famous Players–Lasky, after his Brentwood film commitment was finished. While discussing his performances with the Hollywood Community Theatre in early October, a newspaper mentioned Meredith was "now playing leads at the Lasky studio". Meredith's first picture at Lasky, Luck in Pawn, was released in November 1919. His second Lasky film, in support of Ethel Clayton, was The Thirteenth Commandment, released in January 1920. As with his previous films, though Meredith was the leading man, he still took a distant second place to the female star in terms of billing and publicity.
His third Lasky film was Judy of Rogue's Harbor, for which he supported Mary Miles Minter in a pot-boiler involving kidnapped children, a stolen fortune and bomb-throwing anarchists. The Ladder of Lies starred Ethel Clayton as Edith Parrish, a magazine illustrator whose publisher friend marries an "unworthy" wife. Meredith is the leading man, Blaine, whom Parrish really loves.
A Romantic Adventuress, produced by Adolph Zukor for Lasky, was a twist on the usual storyline for these fantasies. While heroine Dorothy Dalton is supposed to be a professional dancer being exploited by her mother, Meredith's leading man is athletic and gallant, but he's also an engineer with little money. The heroine rejects the temptations of ill-gotten gains from her roguish mother and settles for taking a chance on life with her young man. Reviewers were not impressed with Dalton's attempt at interpretive dancing, nor with the pace of the movie.
In Beyond, adapted from the stage play Lift the Veil, Meredith played opposite Ethel Clayton once more. Directed by William Desmond Taylor for Lasky, the New York Tribune reviewer said: "Miss Clayton, as Avis, did good work, as did, also, Charles Meredith, as the husband. The rest of the cast ranged from fair to terrible." Clayton and Meredith were reunited again in The Cradle, completed at the Lasky studio during October 1921.
Independent player Though he worked for Vidor and Lasky in his first films, Meredith wasn't bound to an exclusive contract like later leading players under the studio system. The Herman Film Corporation, based in Santa Monica, hired Meredith and Margery Wilson for That Something, from a novel by W. W. Woodbridge. The picture was completed by November 1919, and given a preview showing a month later, but wasn't in general release until May 1920. It was the first picture in which Meredith received equal billing with the female star. It was also his first movie in which the focus was on the male character: his downfall from a wealthy upbringing to being a derelict, his reformation through suffering, and his rise back through self-reliance and hard work. The movie was financially backed by the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, to raise funds for its community Settlement House.
Simple Souls starred Blanche Sweet with Meredith as the leading man. Produced by Jesse D. Hampton, it was a fairy tale of "a little shopgirl who marries a duke". Meredith's duke was also a "simple soul", an amateur biologist who naively gives the little shopgirl money to buy books, they being her refuge from drudgery. Another fairy tale of a story was The Perfect Woman, which starred Constance Talmadge and was produced by Joseph M. Schenck for First National Film Distributors. Meredith's character believes he's a woman-hater, until he is rescued by Talmadge from anarchists. The Little 'Fraid Lady, starring Mae Marsh, was a production of the independent Robertson-Cole Pictures Corporation. Marsh played an artist who has isolated herself in the woods through distrust of people; Meredith is the man who reaches through her suspicion.
The Foolish Matrons produced and directed by Maurice Tourneur, was an ensemble film with six lead players, including Meredith. Three interrelated stories, each with its own married couple, make up the plot. During September 1921 Meredith made Hail the Woman with Florence Vidor and Madge Bellamy at the Thomas H. Ince studio.
Sabbatical and stage return At the end of November 1921, with his film career still going strong, Meredith took a year off to study in Europe. Three films he had already completed, The Beautiful Liar, The Cradle, and Woman, Wake Up were released after he had sailed. The year turned into almost two before he returned to Hollywood. He told an interviewer in 1929: "I was a preposterously high paid leading man in pictures... that's how I got the money to go to Europe". Upon returning, he labelled it a "sabbatical", and insisted that actors as well as academics need time off to broaden their knowledge. Meredith said he had studied new cinema and stage developments in Europe. However, his film career in Hollywood had lost its momentum; he had only one more screen role, a small supporting part in In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter (1924), before returning to the stage for over twenty years.
Meredith's final Broadway performance came in March 1925, when he played Doris Keane's lover in Starlight, "a comedy in ten scenes and an epilogue". The play ran thru May 2, 1925 for some 71 performances. He spent the next two years performing in repertory and road companies for plays such as Quarantine and The Comedienne. Thereafter Meredith's stage work would mostly be as director for community and Little Theatre, starting at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, California in November 1927.
Stage direction and academic work Meredith officially replaced Irving Pichel as director for the Santa Barbara Community Arts players during January 1928. He held the position until August 1929, when he resigned in a dispute over whether the Community Arts group should open a drama school and mount amateur productions.
From 1931 Meredith was the director for the Dallas Little Theater. For 1937-1938 he was also head of the Speech and Drama department at the Hockaday School. Meredith resigned the Dallas positions in July 1938 to take up managing and directing at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina. He was elected president of the Confederacy of American Community Theaters during May 1939. Meredith remained with the Dock Street Theatre through 1942, when he took a visiting summer faculty position at the University of Michigan.
Meredith then went to Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in New Orleans as director. While there he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct a survey on independent theatres in America.
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