Milton Sills
Milton Sills (
January 12,
1882 -
September 15,
1930) was a highly successful American stage and film
actor of the early twentieth century.
Milton Sills was born in
Chicago, Illinois into a wealthy and highly regarded family. He was the son of a successful mineral dealer father and an heiress mother from a prosperous banking family. Upon completing high-school, Sills was offered a one-year scholarship to the
University of Chicago where he studied psychology and philosophy. After graduating, he was offered a position at the university as a researcher and within several years worked his way up to becoming a professor at the school.
In
1905 stage actor Donald Robertson visited the school to lecture on author and playwright
Henrik Ibsen and suggested to Sills that he should try his hand at acting. On a whim, Sills agreed and left his prestigious teaching career to embark on a stint in acting. Sills joined Robertson's stock theater company and began touring the country.
In
1908, while Milton Sills was performing in
New York City, he garnered critical praise from such notable
Broadway producers as
David Belasco and
Charles Frohman. That same year he made his Broadway debut in
This Woman and This Man, which was an immediate success with both the theater-going public and critics. From 1908 to
1914, Sills appeared in about a dozen Broadway shows, becoming a crowd favorite and attaining a great deal of fame.
In
1910 Sills married English stage actress Gladys Edith Wynne. The union produced one child, Dorothy Sills, and the couple divorced in
1925. In
1926, Sills remarried, this time to silent film actress
Doris Kenyon, and the couple had a son, Kenyon Clarence Sills, born in 1927.
In 1914 Milton Sills decided to conquer the new medium of motion pictures. He made his film debut the same year in the big-budget drama
The Pit for World Company studios and was signed to a contract with film producer William A. Brady. The film was enormously successful and Sills made three more films for the company, including another huge box-office draw
The Deep Purple opposite silent screen star
Clara Kimball Young. By the late
1910s, Sills had reached leading man status and parted ways with the relatively small World Film company, taking the then unusual path of freelancing as an actor.
By the early
1920s, Sills was enjoying a highly successful acting career and working for such prominent film studios as
MGM,
Paramount Pictures, and
Pathé. Sills was often paired with the most popular leading ladies of the era, including:
Geraldine Farrar,
Gloria Swanson and
Viola Dana. His greatest public and commercial successes came with the release of the now lost
Flaming Youth opposite
Colleen Moore in
1921, and the enormous box-offic hit
The Sea Hawk in
1924.
On
May 11,
1927, Sills had the distinction of being among the original 36 individuals in the film industry to found the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures. Fellow performers included:
Mary Pickford,
Richard Barthelmess,
Jack Holt,
Conrad Nagel,
Douglas Fairbanks, and
Harold Lloyd.
Milton Sills made one sound picture, showing that he had an excellent voice. He died unexpectedly of a
heart attack in 1930 while playing tennis with his wife at his
Santa Barbara, California home at the age of 48. He was interred at the Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum in
Chicago, Illinois,
USA.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Milton Sills was awarded a star on the legendary
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6263 Hollywood Blvd. in
Hollywood, California.
