Hull, Shelley

(1883-1919)

   A native of Louisville, Kentucky, where his father was drama critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Shelley Hull made his first New York stage appearance in a small role in The Crossing (1906). He worked steadily, but without particular success, and in 1910 married actress Josephine Sherwood, who, as Josephine Hull, had a long stage and motion picture career. Hull finally attained stardom opposite Billie Burke in The Mind-the-Paint Girl (1912), and he continued to play opposite her in a series of popular hits, including The Amazons (1913), The Land of Promise (1913), and Jerry (1914). Critics acknowledged his good looks and natural manner on stage, and for the remaining five years of his life he demonstrated promise in several successful plays, including The Cinderella Man (1916), Jesse Lynch Williams's Pulitzer PRizE-winning comedy Why Marry? (1917), as Petru-chio to Laurette Taylor's Kate in The Taming of the Shrew (1918), and in dual roles in Under Orders (1918).