Montgomery County has a close link to the glamor of this weekend’s Academy Awards. Elliston-born Henry King was a swash-buckling actor, director and a founding member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Henry King was born on a farm in Elliston in 1886. Many biographies on King note Christiansburg as his birthplace. However, the book, “Virginia’s Montgomery County” published in 2009, states King was born on a family farm seven miles east of Christiansburg.
According to Sherry Wyatt, curator of the Montgomery Museum and Lewis Miller Regional Art Center, and author of the article, “The Unforgotten Henry King”, published on the Museum’s website, King grew up and “attended school in Lafayette, Virginia, where he was passionate about one-act plays and recitations.”
King left school to work for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, mostly in machine shops.
Wyatt wrote, “A visit by “Doctor” Alward’s traveling medicine show to Lafayette enticed young King to leave his hometown. King worked with several tour companies during his traveling-show career and performed nine shows a week in various towns.”
These traveling shows were vaudevillian in nature with song and dance routines. King also performed with a succession of touring repertory companies.
Wyatt reported, “King received his first small directing role with a stock company in Chicago.”
While touring in New York, he was introduced to Wilber Melville, an independent movie producer, who persuaded King to sign a contract and move to the West Coast. In 1913, King began making appearances in silent movies. He eventually acted in more than a hundred short and feature films. Some film titles include “The Devil’s Bait,” “Shadows and Sunshine,” and “Should a Wife Forgive.”
Wyatt wrote, “He sometimes performed his own stunts without any safety precautions. During King’s acting career, he began writing screenplays. In the 1915 movie “Who Pays,” for example, a violent fight sequence was based on a fight that he had witnessed at the train station in Elliston. King choreographed and directed the scene; it was his first experience in film directing”
King is credited with not only writing the series of twelve three-reel dramas in which he and Ruth Roland starred in each episode, they played different roles each time.
From 1915, King’s directing career gathered momentum. Wyatt learned, “King directed the 1921 movie “Tol’able David,” which was filmed in Highland County, Virginia. A box office smash, it is considered his masterpiece.”
In 1926, Louis B. Mayer wanted to short-circuit the growing labor union movement in Hollywood. As co-founder of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios, Mayer decided to create an umbrella organization whose membership would be open to all employees of the film industry. Dozens of Hollywood dignitaries were invited to attend an organizing banquet at the Ambassador Hotel on Jan. 11, 1927. King was one of thirty-six attendees who became the founding members of the AMPAS to be incorporated on May 4, 1927. Other famously known founding members included actor Douglas Fairbanks, actor Mary Pickford, producer Cecil B. de Mille, and director Frank Lloyd.
In 1930, King was hired by Goldwyn United Artists, which was later merged into Twentieth Century Fox. He would spend the rest of his career with that studio. King would go on to make many hit movies: “State Fair, “, “Twelve O’clock High,” “Jesse James,” “Carousel,” “Tender Is the Night,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, and more.
He worked with stars such as Will Rogers, Shirley Temple, Rock Hudson, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Lew Ayres, Vincent Price, Susan Hayward, William Holden, Shirley Jones, Ava Gardner, Tyrone Power and many more during his expansive career. King directed eight different actors to AMPAS-nominated performances: Alice Brady, Jennifer Jones, Charles Bickford, Gladys Cooper, Anne Revere, Alexander Knox, Dean Jagger and Gregory Peck. King directed Peck in six films.
King was only nominated for two AMPAS or “Oscars” for Best Director for the 1943 film “The Song of Bernadette” and the 1944 film “Wilson”. King did win a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1956 by the Directors Guild of America.
Wyatt wrote, “Henry King passed away at his home in Toluca Lake, California in 1982 at the age of 96. A pioneer in the motion picture industry King is credited with directing more than 160 motion pictures between 1915 and 1961. Yet his work and dedication to the film industry are largely unnoticed today. Henry King deserves to be remembered in his native Montgomery County.”
This Sunday, the 91st Academy Awards will honor the best films of 2018 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, Montgomery County is linked directly to Hollywood’s fevered pitch of the AMPAS telecast where millions of movie lovers tune in to watch the winning of the highest honors in filmmaking.
