George Probert(1870-1949)
- Actor
George Probert was a stage actor who worked regional theatre for much
of his twenties and broke onto Broadway at age 25. Like many actors of
his day, he bounced back and forth between Broadway and the road for
several years, unable to consistently make a living along the Great
White Way, despite appearing in 2 highly successful productions of the
day. "Brewster's Millions" had run for nearly 5 months of 1907 and
"Samson" provided 6 months' work beginning in mid-Fall 1908. Despite
these early tastes of fame, the road show circuits always offered far
more consistent employment--- even a marginal production might offer a
season of bookings with the added camaraderie of a tight-knit acting
company. Film work was merely a financial dalliance with Probert; in
Late August 1915, Pathe offered him his first shot on screen with
The Spender (1915) in New York as
part of what turned out to be 3 quickly produced features that were all
released between October, 1915 and January, 1916. When production on
The King's Game (1916) ended in
November, 1915 he returned to the road, sporadically returning to
Broadway and picking up his fourth-- and last-- screen role one of
flamboyant Alla Nazimova's self-produced
flops, Madame Peacock (1920). He
resumed his life living out of trunk, on and off Broadway until age 56,
when he decided to focus solely on a Broadway career, even if it meant
trodding the boards working for The Federal Theatre Project of The
Works Progress Administration (with the Great Depression still gripping
the New York Theatre, 1936 also saw no less than the likes of
Orson Welles and
John Houseman employed by various
theatrical branches of the WPA). WPA productions were, by design,
employment projects, favoring relatively large casts working strictly
for scale, with a benign disregard for commercial success. Ironically,
Probert enjoyed one of his greatest successes with the WPA-produced
drama, "The Big Blow" written by Florida novelist
Theodore Pratt, which ran for 157
performances at Maxine Elliott's Theatre. A year later, he finally had
his first role in a bona fide smash hit, with
Moss Hart's and
George S. Kaufman's, "The Man Who Came
to Dinner" as "John" (role portrayed by
Edwin Stanley in the 1942 film version),
remaining in the cast through the entire 739 production-run at
Irving Berlin's Music Box Theatre.
Probert's later life is a mystery. Being 62 at the close of his last
Broadway production it seems unlikely he would have returned to the
grueling itinerant road show life.
