Richard Neill

Sothern, Augustus Thomas and Louise Dresser. Neill was considered something of a daredevil during the first decade of filmmaking and became "the first white man to take a canoe through the foaming rapids of Au Sable Chasm." That was during the 1911 filming of the Edison 1-reel The Spirit of the Gorge. Neill performed other stunts in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1912), also for Edison, before switching to Thanhouser and Fox. In interviews, Neill proclaimed to be mainly interested in playing villains "in comedies," but the gaunt-looking actor would soon find himself typecast as "half-breeds" or Mexicans in "B"-Westerns. He did scores of them in the 1920s, including Harry Carey's Satan Town (1926; as "Cherokee Charlie") and Buddy Roosevelt's The Desert of the Lost (1927; as the vicious bandit "El Chino). Sound rudely interrupted this string of memorable characterizations, but the veteran actor continued in films, hundreds of them, as an extra. When he died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills at the age of 94, Neill's obituary claimed he had been in films for seventy years. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide