Stuart Armstrong Walker was an American producer and director in theatre and motion pictures.
Background
Stuart Armstrong Walker was born in Augusta, Ky. , the only son of Cliff Stuart Walker and Matilda Taliaferro (Armstrong) Walker. His father, who had come from North Carolina, was in 1880 a clerk on the Ohio River steamer Bonanza and afterward a railroad freight agent until he acquired business interests in Louisiana. The family lived in Covington, Ky. , across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Education
Stuart attended Woodward High School in Cincinnati and received a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering in 1903. A toy theatre, given to him by his father during a childhood bout with measles, began his lifelong fascination with the theatre, which always remained to him a place of wonder and mystery. At the University of Cincinnati he was one of the founders of the Comedy Club, writing and acting in some original playlets.
Career
He went to work as a shipping clerk at the Southern Creosoting Company of Slidell, La. , but soon found the lumber trade dreary and uninspiring. In 1908 he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. The following year Walker met David Belasco and appeared in a minor role in Belasco's production of Is Matrimony a Failure? Thereafter he served the producer for several years as play reader, actor, and director. From this exposure to the lavish, flamboyant, often vulgar realism of Belasco's productions Walker emerged with the integrity of his theatrical vision intact; his slim, boyish good looks and wire-rimmed spectacles belied a fierce individuality. In 1914 he became a director for Jessie Bonstelle at her theatres in Buffalo and Detroit. After approximately a year with Miss Bonstelle, Walker struck out on his own, utilizing his engineering training and his theatrical experience to create what he called his Portmanteau Theatre. Billed as "The Theatre That Comes to You, " this was a completely self-contained mobile unit. Scenery, lighting equipment, and properties traveled in cartons which were overturned to form the stage floor, and the stage could be erected within an hour. Stagecraft and decor were simple, but Walker's innovative and dramatic lighting techniques produced effects of beauty (he introduced the "X-ray" system of stage lighting in 1915 and, in 1918, the independent spotlight system, which became standard theatrical practice). His ideal was to make imaginative drama of high quality available to large numbers of Americans in every part of the nation. Walker was a writer of talent, as well as a gifted director and technician, and when the Portmanteau Theatre first opened at the Christodora Settlement House in New York City on July 14, 1915, its repertory contained two of his original plays, The Trimplet and Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil. Both contained strong elements of fantasy, which was Walker's forte, and demanded an imaginative response from the audience, as did the best of his later plays, The Lady of the Weeping Willow Tree and Jonathan Makes a Wish. Two volumes of his work, Portmanteau Plays and More Portmanteau Plays, appeared in 1917 and 1919, respectively, and in 1921 Walker published Portmanteau Adaptations, which included his version of Gammer Gurton's Needle, one of the earliest English farces. He also adapted The Book of Job and Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, and later toured successfully with both. With its repertory of fourteen plays (for which Walker drew heavily on the works of the Irish dramatist Lord Dunsany, whose mystical parables suited his taste and the Portmanteau's limitations), the Portmanteau played at two theatres in New York and then traveled through the Midwest. Walker regarded the repertory system as the best way to ensure the artistic development of individual actors and the entire company, and he was one of the first to introduce the "apprentice system" for training young actors. There were no "stars" in his company, only talented young apprentices who were capable of exchanging roles within the repertory; they were devoted to Walker, and several later became stars, including Spring Byington, Kay Francis, Lillian Ross, and Blanche Yurka. In his Portmanteau, Walker caught the essence of the "little theatre" movement, which, originating in the art theatres of Europe, was being imported to the United States as an antidote to the commercial mediocrity of the American stage. In his noncommercialism (he originally funded the project himself), his advocacy of the poetic in dramatic literature, his championing of theatre for everyone, his willingness to experiment, and his desire to foster the growth of young talent, Walker emerges as an unassuming and often overlooked hero of the movement. In 1917 he abandoned his portable stage and became resident director of the Indianapolis Repertory Company, a position he held until 1923. From 1922 to 1931 he directed the Cincinnati Repertory Company (after 1929 called the Stuart Walker Repertory Company); for two years of this period (1926 - 28) he concurrently directed the Indianapolis company again. Though he received less attention than he had with his unique Portmanteau, Walker established an impressive record of experimentation, putting on several hundred plays--among them a sizable number of premieres of plays by foreign and native authors--continuing his work with the repertory idea and the training of young actors, and achieving surprising financial success. In 1930 Walker grew restless and turned to motion pictures. Originally engaged by Paramount as a screen writer and acting coach, he soon was directing his own films. At first these were conventional studio products (Tonight Is Ours, The Eagle and the Hawk, Evenings for Sale), but during an interim (1934 - 35) with Universal Pictures he made Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He returned to Paramount in 1936 as an associate producer and as such supervised the screen version of Seventeen (1940) and a succession of "Bulldog Drummond" features. He died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-one in Beverly Hills, Calif. , and after an Episcopal funeral service was buried next to his parents in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati.
Achievements
Connections
Walker never married, although in 1926 he adopted a son, Arthur Helm, whom he had met through a Kentucky relative and who took his name.