Edward Hearn (actor)

Guy Edward Hearn (September 6, 1888 – April 15, 1963) was an American actor who, in a forty-year film career, starting in 1915, played hundreds of roles, starting with juvenile leads, then, briefly, as leading man, all during the silent era.

With the arrival of sound, he became a character actor, appearing in scores of productions for virtually every studio, in which he was mostly unbilled, while those credits in which he was listed, reflected at least nine stage names, most frequently Edward Hearn, but also Guy E. Hearn, Ed Hearn, Eddie Hearn, Eddie Hearne, and Edward Hearne.

Born in Dayton, Columbia County, Washington, He became an actor in his twenties, with a first known film credit listed in the 1915 short The Fool's Heart.

His initial feature was Her Bitter Cup in 1916, the year during which he was seen in sixteen shorts and features. 1917 was equally prolific for him, providing seventeen appearances. As short films gave way to features, the number of his annual productions decreased (four in 1918, four in 1919 and five in 1920), but he continued to work steadily, with film credits in every year of his career. He was third-billed in Faith, the 1920 production starring Peggy Hyland with J. Parks Jones, and had a supporting role that year in the serial, Daredevil Jack, a vehicle for boxing champion Jack Dempsey.

Engaged by Universal Pictures' early silent film subsidiary, Bluebird Photoplays, as leading man to Ruth Clifford in 1918's The Lure of Luxury, Hearn was subsequently put under contract with the low-budget studio Film Booking Offices of America (also known as FBO Pictures Corporation) and alternated between roles as leading man (to Ruth Renick in Tahiti-filmed The Fire Bride (1922), Jane Novak in Colleen of the Pines (1922), Gladys Walton The Town Scandal (1923), Laura La Plante Excitement (1924), and Josie Sedgwick in The Outlaw's Daughter (1925), and second leads, billed after Patsy Ruth Miller, Ralph Graves and Edna Murphy in Daughters of Today (1924).^{[citation needed]}

In 1925, Hearn was fourth-billed as Clara Bow's brother in The Lawful Cheater, a crime drama fashioned as a vehicle for the flapper star, while he also had a rare first-billed role as the central character, Philip Nolan, in Fox Film Corporation's adaptation of Edward Everett Hale's classic short story, "The Man Without a Country". He was also top-billed in a minor 1924 western, The Devil's Partner, which not released until 1926, the year he was the human leading actor in a May vehicle for the dog star Peter the Great, a German Shepherd who, after appearing in one more film, was fatally shot in June.^{[citation needed]}

In 1926, he was Helen Holmes' leading man in Perils of the Rail, while playing an unbilled cameo as a Union Army officer in another railroad-centered film, Buster Keaton's The General. In 1927, he was second-billed to Cornelius Keefe in Hook and Ladder No. 9, third-billed in the Larry Semon vehicle Spuds, the John Bowers–Anne Cornwall starrer The Heart of the Yukon and the Buffalo Bill, Jr. western series entry Pals in Peril, had lower-billed roles in four other films and played an unbilled bit in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings.^{[citation needed]}

In 1928, as Hearn reached his fortieth birthday, his changing fortunes were reflected through the six productions in which he appeared. He was still briefly cast as a leading man, but only to German Shepherds. "The New Pathé Dog Star, Cyclone" in the Spencer Gordon Bennet-directed Pathé Exchange serial The Yellow Cameo, was first, with the film's poster highlighting only the names of leading lady Allene Ray and Cyclone, while FBO's feature film "Dog Justice", another vehicle for a German Shepherd (this dog's name was Ranger), came second. The other four titles, however, placed him between fifth and eighth in their cast lists.