That same year, George married Seena Owen (née Signe Auen of Spokane, Wash.). They probably met on the set of Intolerance, where Seena played Princess Beloved in the Fall of Babylon story. The union, the only marriage for either of them, would end in divorce in 1924. (UPDATE 8/14/22: It turns out this was not in fact George Walsh’s only marriage, despite what the IMDb says. See the comment below from “Anonymous”, who married George’s eldest son Tom in 1982, but who only met George once and remembers few details. A second commenter, “Art”, who evidently knew Anonymous, provides another piece of the puzzle, and a visit to Find a Grave fills in the rest. The second Mrs. Walsh was born Winnifred Craven on July 1, 1911. She married George in 1942 when he was 53 and she was 21. Winnifred died February 2, 1966 at the age of 54; she and George are buried together in San Gabriel Cemetery, California.)

 

George Walsh’s career flourished as William Fox’s slightly younger answer to Douglas Fairbanks. By this I mean he was an “answer” to the early Fairbanks, before The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, etc. landed him permanently in costume swashbucklers. Before Zorro, the typical Fairbanks hero was a boyish, high-spirited American naif, triumphing over adversity in effortless leaps and bounds, always with a beaming, irresistible smile. 

 

And so it was with George Walsh. His pictures from 1916 to 1920 are probably all irretrievably lost, but reviews in Variety document their pleasures, and Walsh’s appeal: The Mediator (’16), “Walsh proves himself as good a rough and tumble man as ever got into focus”; Melting Millions (’17), “his athletic ability stands him in good stead for this particular line of work”; Brave and Bold (’18), “Mr. Walsh does some athletics, jumping over everybody in his path, runs an auto or motorcycle, whichever is the handiest when needed, and climbs up the front of the Ft. Pitt hotel at Pittsburgh to keep an appointment with a French prince”; On the Jump (’18), “…the whole thing is built around Mr. Walsh, apparently with the idea of giving him opportunities to perform unusual stunts”; Luck and Pluck (’19), “Walsh is in his glory scaling walls, climbing trees, foiling cops, etc. There are a couple of corking fights where he handles anywhere from a dozen to twenty opponents at a time”; From Now On (’20), “What may be held up for approval is the hard work which George Walsh invests in it.” The image conjured up from these reviews is a series of lightweight adventures distinguished by George’s prowess; as brother Raoul, who directed From Now On, said years later, “Well, anything with him wouldn’t be too heavy.”

 

George’s career did get a little heavier as the 1920s dawned. In 1922 he played explorer Henry Morton Stanley in With Stanley in Africa; neither the film nor any reviews seem to have survived (though this French postcard image does), but it appears a more serious departure from his vehicles to date. So was Vanity Fair the next year, in which he played the dashing wastrel Rawdon Crawley; the picture, unfortunately, was not well received. It’s an open question how well Thackeray’s huge novel could be adapted into an 80-minute silent movie, but writer-director Hugo Ballin seems not to have risen to the occasion; Variety carped that most of the picture was frittered away on closeups of Ballin’s wife Mabel, who played Becky Sharp. In any case, Walsh didn’t make much of an impression. He had better luck with Rosita, playing the love interest for Mary Pickford under the direction of German émigré Ernst Lubitsch making his first American picture; Walsh basked in the reflected glory showered on Lubitsch and Pickford by the movie’s artistic and commercial success.

 

Then came what looked like the break of a lifetime: George Walsh was chosen by writer June Mathis to play the title role in Metro’s screen adaptation of Ben-Hur, to be shot on location in Rome. The role was coveted by every actor in movies except Jackie Coogan. The most popular choice, Rudolph Valentino, was out of play because of a contract dispute with Famous Players-Lasky; until they settled their differences, the studio wasn’t about to let him work for anyone else. Mathis ordered tests, dozens of them, and Walsh won out. In his recounting of the Ben-Hur production in The Parade’s Gone By, Kevin Brownlow tells us that there was little enthusiasm in Hollywood for the choice; George was a fine physical specimen, they all said, but not that strong an actor.

 

To Walsh, this surely seemed like the gravy train to glory, and he grabbed on with both hands. He gladly agreed to a salary cut when offered the role, and even swallowed his umbrage when, as the company sailed for Italy in the spring of 1924, he found himself relegated to second-class accommodations. Arriving in Rome, he worked out every day with his co-star Francis X. Bushman (playing the villain Messala) and posed for a few publicity stills like this one. Otherwise he was ignored.

Things didn’t go well for Ben-Hur in Italy. Sets weren’t ready, equipment wasn’t available, crews couldn’t speak English, supervisors couldn’t speak Italian. Matters began in a state of disorganization and degenerated into hopeless chaos. June Mathis, ostensibly the production supervisor as well as scriptwriter, was barred from the set by director Charles Brabin — not that there was much set to bar her from. While construction dawdled along, the company adjourned to Anzio to shoot the sea battle; Brabin sat around guzzling wine and regaling the crew with long-winded stories while underlings haggled with local bureaucrats, and hundreds of extras idled sweltering on the beach. When cameras finally rolled, everything went wrong.

Well, I needn’t go on; you can get the whole story from Brownlow. By autumn of 1924, the newly-formed MGM had inherited this mess, and the new bosses, L.B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, took drastic action. Brabin was fired because his footage was awful. June Mathis was fired because she had been the supposed supervisor of this fiasco, and had insisted on shooting in Rome in the first place. And George Walsh was fired because Mathis had hired him — besides, MGM wanted to build up their rising star Ramon Novarro, and since Walsh hadn’t yet appeared on film it would cost only the price of a ticket home to get rid of him. Walsh and Bushman (who was one of the few survivors of the purge) read about the changes in the newspapers. The whole company — what was left of it — was ordered back to California at once, where Mayer and Thalberg could keep a close eye on things.

It was all a bitter pill for George. “You know, Frank,” he told Bushman, “I felt this was going to happen. But to leave me over here for so long, to let me die in pictures — and then to change me!” Because MGM, in damage-control mode, kept mum about the state of the production and the reasons for such sweeping changes, the impression was left that George simply couldn’t cut it — just as everyone had suspected.

Could he have cut it? Maybe, maybe not. June Mathis shrugged off her own dismissal, saying her chief regret was for Walsh: “I had complete faith in his ability to play Ben-Hur,” she told Photoplay. “I realize many other people did not believe in him, but the same thing occurred when I selected Rudolph Valentino for the role of Julio in The Four Horsemen. Valentino justified himself, and I am confident that Mr. Walsh would have done the same thing. Actually, he was given no opportunity to succeed or fail. He was withdrawn without a chance. Indeed, Mr. Novarro was in Rome for three days before Mr. Walsh was notified that he had been succeeded in the leading role.” Nevertheless, in Hollywood — then as now — image was everything. George slunk home a “failure”, even though he had not faced the cameras for so much as a frame of film.

He didn’t exactly “die in pictures”, but in an age where a star was expected to appear in a new picture several times a year — even every few weeks — George Walsh was off the screen from December 1923 to October ’25. He might as well have moved to Tibet and become a hermit. He had lost momentum, and he never really got it back. His vehicles continued as they had before, with titles like American Pluck, The Kick-Off, Striving for Fortune and His Rise to Fame, but the scripts were more formulaic than ever, the productions cheaper and more slapdash, the companies increasingly fly-by-night. The kid was looking less clever than he once had; more important, he was no longer a kid. His last starring vehicle was the inaptly named Inspiration (1928), which Variety termed “for second run houses in not too particular neighborhoods.”

 

After the coming of sound Walsh made a few movies, but was never again top-billed. Supporting roles (often in brother Raoul’s pictures like Me and My Gal, The Bowery and Under Pressure) slid into bits — like this one in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934), as a courier bringing Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) and Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) the bad news that Octavian is on the march. After Raoul’s Klondike Annie and a couple of Poverty Row westerns in 1936, George decided to call it a day in pictures, and retired from the screen to work as a racehorse trainer for the Hollywood horsey set.

All in all, George Walsh didn’t have such a bad run; his pictures were breezy, undemanding fun in their day and he had a definite following. Getting canned from Ben-Hur was a blow, no doubt, but how much of his subsequent career slide was due to his two years out of circulation, and how much was simply because his day was done, is something I guess we’ll never know. Like any other star, he arrived, he blazed, and he waned, then (unlike some) lived to a ripe old age: George Walsh was 92 when he passed away in Pomona, Calif. in 1981.