Background
Mclaglen, Victor was born on 10 December 1886 in Tumbridge Wells. England. Son of Review Andrew and Lillian (Burke) Mclaglen.
Mclaglen, Victor was born on 10 December 1886 in Tumbridge Wells. England. Son of Review Andrew and Lillian (Burke) Mclaglen.
McLaglen was taken from the boxing ring to the movies in England in 1920 and he was a successful roughneck for several years: The Call of the Road (20, A. E. Coleby): Carnival (21, Harley Knoles); Corinthian Jack (21. Walter Rowden); The Spori of Kings (21, Arthur Rooke); The Glorious Adventure (22, f. Stuart Blackton); A Romance of Old Bagdad (22, Kenelm Foss); The Romany (23, F. Martin Thornton); Lord of the White Road (23, Rooke); and The Gay Corinthian (25, Rooke).
He escaped a slump in British films by going to America for The Beloved Brute (25, Blackton) and soon became established: Winds of Chance (25, Frank Llovd); The Fighting Heart (25, John Ford); Beau Geste (26, Herbert Brenon); What Price Glory? (26, Raoul Walsh); opposite Dolores del Rio in The Loves of Carmen (27, Walsh); Mother Machree (28. Ford); with Louise Brooks in A Girl in Every Pori (28, Howard Hawks); Hangman’s House (28, Ford); Strong Boy (29, Ford); and The Black Watch (29, Ford and Lumsden Hare). Then he repeated the part of Captain Flagg (opposite Edmund Lowe's Sergeant Quirk) from What Price Glory? in Raoul Walsh’s The Cock-Eyed World (29), and later in Women of All Nations (31, Walsh).
At this time, McLaglen was a top star at Fox, and he appeared in Hot for Paris (29, Walsh); A Devil With Women (30, Irving Cummings); suqirisingly at ease in Dishonored (31, Josef von Sternberg); Annabelle’s Affairs (31, Alfred Werker); Wicked (31, Allan Dwan); and While Paris Sleeps (32, Dwan). But Fox dropped him, and he was forced back to England to make Dick Turpin (33, W. Victor Hanbury).
Ford restored him to American stardom in The Lost Patrol (34), and after The Wharf Angel (34, William Cameron Menzies and George Sonnies), Murder at the Vanities (34, Mitchell Leisen), The Captain Hates the Sea (34, Lewis Milestone), and Under Pressure (35, Walsh), McLaglen won the best actor Oscar as Gvpo in The Informer (35, Ford). It is a hard film to endure, and symptomatic of Ford’s Irish willingness to see brutality inflated into religion and patriotism by drink. This performance was so far outside American traditions of economy, the Academy persuaded themselves that it was noble acting.
He followed this with Professional Soldier (35, Tay Garnett); Klondike Annie (36, Walsh), with Mae West; Under Two Flags (36, Frank Lloyd); The Magnificent Bmte (36, John Blystone); Sea Devils (37, Ben Stoloff); Nancy Steele Is Missing (37, George Marshall); with Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (37. Ford), and both in skirts, since McLaglen played a kilted NCO.
He then went trundling downhill: Let Freedom Bing (39, Jack Conway); Gunga Din (39, George Stevens); Full Confession (39, John Farrow); Captain Fury (39, Hal Roach); Rio (39. John Brahm); The Big Guy (40. Arthur Lubin); China Girl (42, Henry Hathaway); The Princess and the Pirate (44, David Butler); Roger Touhy, Gangster (44, Robert Florey); Calendar Girl (47, Dwan); and The Foxes of Harrow (47, John M. Stahl).
He was saved from extinction by Sergeants Mulcahy and Quincannon in Ford’s cavalry trilogy: Foii Apache (48); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (49); and Rio Grande (50), a punch-drunk elowm, bursting out of his uniform and calling everyone “darlin ." Ford then pursued his private world to the point of burlesque—and made one of his most entertaining films, The Quiet Man (52), which involved McLaglen in windmill fisticuffs with John Wayne and so actually travestied violence that fighting reverted to slapstick. The draught of so many punches unsteadied him, and in his last years he tottered from one silliness to another: Fair Wind to Java (53, Joseph Kane); Prince Valiant (54, Hathaway); Trouble in the Glen (54, Herbert Wilcox); Lady Godiva (55, Lubin); Bengazi (55, Brahm); The Abductors (57, Andrew V. McLaglen, his son); and Sea Fury (58, Cy Endfield).
Served as provost marshal of Bagdad, Iraq, 1914-1918.; Mason (32°).
Of all the screen’s tough guys, McLaglen could have claimed the most authentic grounding in personal experience. Fatherly care kept the teenager out of the Boer War, but nothing stopped McLaglen from becoming a notable boxer, a vaudeville performer, a gold miner in Australia, and a soldier in the First World War. The instinct to fight never deserted him or his great bulk. Even so, muscle and a rather whining heartiness made him a swaggeringly implausible actor forever doing his “turn.” Self-pity' and barroom Irish bravado were the kevs to his work, and the fact that so much of it was done for John Ford only exposes the maudlin bullying in Ford’s poetic vision.
Married Enid Mary Lamont, 1919 (died 1942).; married second, Suzanna Maria Brueggemann, November 20, 1943 (divorced 1948). Children: Andrew Victor, Sheila Mary.