Hero of the Month: George Brent
People come to Hollywood from many unusual paths. George Brent’s was a little more dangerous than others. A child actor in his native Ireland, he later joined the IRA during the Irish Rebellion and eventually had to be sneaked out of the country with a price on his head for his subversive activities, though he claimed later in life to have only been a courier. Immigrating first to Canada and then the USA he ended up in New York where he worked his way up from from playing in stock companys to Broadway in the late twenties.
He came to Hollywood at the end of the decade and began appearing in films. One of his first leading roles was in Mascot’s The Lightning Warrior (1931), co-staring with silent superstar Rin-Tin-Tin in his final film, where the two team up with Frankie Darro to solve the murder of Rinty’s owner and quell an Indian uprising being formented by the mysterious Wolf Man.
Signing with Warner Brothers, Brent became a popular leading man, and notorious offscreen womanizer (he was married four times and supposedly had an ongoing long term affair with Bette Davis). His credits include such popular films as 42nd Street (1933), The Painted Veil (1934), Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory (1939) and The Spiral Staircase (1946).
Brent drifted into B-movies during the late forties, appearing in Angel on the Amazon (1948), Red Canyon (1949), FBI Girl, (1951) and Montanna Belle (1952). Brent retired from acting after Mexican Manhunt (1953), though he would occasionally pop up in small roles in TV films like Lucky Luciano (1973) and Born Again (1978) before his death in 1979 from emphasema.
