George Probert

George Probert was a stage actor who worked regional theatre for much of his twenties and broke onto Broadway at age 25. Like many actors of his day, he bounced back and forth between Broadway and the road for several years, unable to consistently make a living along the Great White Way, despite appearing in 2 highly successful productions of the day. "Brewster's Millions" had run for nearly 5 months of 1907 and "Samson" provided 6 months' work beginning in mid-Fall 1908. Despite these early tastes of fame, the road show circuits always offered far more consistent employment--- even a marginal production might offer a season of bookings with the added camaraderie of a tight-knit acting company. Film work was merely a financial dalliance with Probert; in Late August 1915, Pathe offered him his first shot on screen with The Spender (1915) in New York as part of what turned out to be 3 quickly produced features that were all released between October, 1915 and January, 1916. When production on The King's Game (1916) ended in November, 1915 he returned to the road, sporadically returning to Broadway and picking up his fourth-- and last-- screen role one of flamboyant Alla Nazimova's self-produced flops, Madame Peacock (1920). He resumed his life living out of trunk, on and off Broadway until age 56, when he decided to focus solely on a Broadway career, even if it meant trodding the boards working for The Federal Theatre Project of The Works Progress Administration (with the Great Depression still gripping the New York Theatre, 1936 also saw no less than the likes of Orson Welles and John Houseman employed by various theatrical branches of the WPA). WPA productions were, by design, employment projects, favoring relatively large casts working strictly for scale, with a benign disregard for commercial success. Ironically, Probert enjoyed one of his greatest successes with the WPA-produced drama, "The Big Blow" written by Florida novelist Theodore Pratt, which ran for 157 performances at Maxine Elliott's Theatre. A year later, he finally had his first role in a bona fide smash hit, with Moss Hart's and George S. Kaufman's, "The Man Who Came to Dinner" as "John" (role portrayed by Edwin Stanley in the 1942 film version), remaining in the cast through the entire 739 production-run at Irving Berlin's Music Box Theatre. Probert's later life is a mystery. Being 62 at the close of his last Broadway production it seems unlikely he would have returned to the grueling itinerant road show life.