Dustin Farnum(1874-1929)
- Actor
- Producer
American leading man of silent pictures who specialized in Westerns.
His mother and father were, respectively, a singer and an actor, and he
and his younger brother William Farnum were introduced to the theatre at an
early age. Raised in Maine, Dustin attended the East Maine Conference
Seminary, but left school to go on the stage at the age of fifteen.
With his brother, he formed a vaudeville act consisting largely of
tumbling and wrestling. He spent several years touring in stock
companies before making a great success in the play "Arizona" in New
York. After a number of Broadway hits, he went to Cuba in 1913 to star
in a film, Soldiers of Fortune (1914). Soon thereafter, Cecil B. DeMille gave Farnum the leading
role in the film version of one of Farnum's Broadway hits, "The Squaw
Man." He followed this smash hit with a number of film versions of
plays he had starred in on Broadway. His brother William had himself
become a big star in pictures, and the two of them signed contracts
with the Fox Film Corporation. Although Dustin Farnum played a wide
variety of roles, he tended toward Westerns and became one of the
biggest stars of the genre. At the age of fifty-two, Farnum retired
from films and, but for a few stage roles, lived quietly with his third
wife, actress Winifred Kingston for three years, until his death in 1929 from
kidney failure.
