Huston, Walter

(1884-1950)

   Canadian-born Walter Huston spent most of his career on American stages and in motion pictures following his 1902 stage debut in Toronto. Huston's first Broadway appearance, in the melodrama In Convict's Stripes (1905), led to a long and varied career on vaudeville stages between 1909 and 1924. The breadth of Huston's experience paid off when he turned to the legitimate stage and scored a major success as the crusty 75-year-old farmer Ephraim Cabot in Eugene O'Neill's New England tragedy, Desire Under the Elms (1924), after which Huston played Ponce de Leon in O'Neill's The Fountain (1925). Other Huston successes included roles in Kongo (1926), The Barker (1927), and Elmer the Great (1928). With the advent of sound films, Huston shifted his attention to screen work, beginning with D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930), but he made periodic returns to the stage, notably in the title role of Sidney Howard's Dodsworth* (1934). He repeated this performance in a lavish 1936 screen adaptation, then returned to Broadway to introduce "The September Song" in the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson musical, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938).