George Fawcett

American actor George Fawcett was Virginia born and bred, but one couldn't be faulted for mistaking him as an Englishman; even in his youth he had the weather-beaten countenance of John Bull himself. Trained for the stage at Sargent's School of Acting, Fawcett had 30 years' theatrical experience under his belt when he entered films in or around 1914. Almost immediately labelled "the Grand Old Man of films" (at 54, he was nearly three times as old as most movie personalities of the period), Fawcett played stern and unforgiving fathers, grim-visaged judges (as in the Babylonian sequences of Griffith's Intolerance [1916]) and beetle-browed village elders. He worked with D. W. Griffith at both ends of the silent-film spectrum, appearing in the director's final non-talkie, The Lady of the Pavements (1929). Sound provided no barriers for Fawcett, whose rolling theatrical tones were picked up beautifully by the primitive recording equipment. But by 1931, Fawcett was too ill to carry on his career, so he retired to his East Coast home in Massachusetts, in the company of his actress/wife Percy Haswell (who was content to accept billing as "Mrs. George Fawcett"). In 1939, George D. Fawcett died of heart failure at the age of 79.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide