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Douglas Fairbanks

American actor and filmmaker (1883–1939)

For his son, see Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Douglas Elton Fairbanks Sr.^[1] (born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman; May 23, 1883 – December 12, 1939) was an American actor and filmmaker best known for being the first actor to play the masked VigilanteZorro^[2] and other swashbuckling roles in silent films. One of the biggest stars of the silent era, Fairbanks was referred to as "The King of Hollywood".^[3] He was also a founding member of United Artists as well as the Motion Picture Academy and hosted the 1st Academy Awards in 1929.

Born in Denver, Colorado, Fairbanks started acting from an early age and established himself as an accomplished stage actor on Broadway by the late 1900s. He made his film debut in 1915 and quickly became one of the most popular and highest paid actors in Hollywood. In 1919, he co-founded United Artists alongside Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith. Fairbanks married Pickford in 1920 and the couple came to be regarded as "Hollywood royalty". Primarily a

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Douglas Fairbanks was born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman in Denver, Colorado, to Ella Adelaide (nee Marsh) and Hezekiah Charles Ullman, an attorney and native of Pennsylvania, who was a captain for the Union forces during the Civil War. Fairbanks' paternal grandparents were German Jewish immigrants, while his mother, a Southerner with roots in Louisiana and Georgia, was of British Isles descent. From the age of five he was raised by his mother due to her husband's abandonment. She changed her sons' surnames to Fairbanks (her former husband's surname) and covered up their paternal Jewish ancestry.

He began amateur theater at age 12 and continued while attending the Colorado School of Mines. In 1900 they moved to New York. He attended Harvard, traveled to Europe, worked on a cattle freighter, in a hardware store and as a clerk on Wall Street. He made his Broadway debut in 1902 and five years later left theater to marry an industrialist's daughter.

He returned when his father-in-law went broke the next year. In 1915, he went to Hollywood and worked under a reluc

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FAIRBANKS, DOUGLAS, SR. (1883-1939)

Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

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A major force in the motion picture industry in the 1910s and 1920s, Douglas Fairbanks is best remembered for his swashbuckling costume pictures. He was born Douglas Elton Ulman on May 23, 1883, in Denver, Colorado, the last of three children to Ella and H. Charles Ulman. After his father deserted the family, he was raised by his mother, who reassumed the surname of her first husband, Fairbanks. The family relocated to New York City in 1900, and young Doug began appearing in a succession of light comedies on Broadway. By 1914 he had established himself as a leading performer in satiric comedies like The Show Shop and The New Henrietta.

Lured to Hollywood in 1915, his buoyant optimism and physical agility transferred easily to the motion picture screen. In just his first year at Triangle.Fine Arts, the spectacular success of open-air adventures like The Lamb (1915) and The Good Bad Man (1916) and farcical comedies like His Picture in the Papers and American Aristocracy (1916) encoura