Gorgeous George O’Brien
Our biography is so big, I decided to break it up in to 2 pages. And this is a GOOD thing. Many thanks go out to E for helping me put this thing together!
George O’Brien was born on April 19th, 1899 in San Francisco, California. He was the elder son of Daniel J. O’Brien and his wife Margaret L. Donahue. Both parents were natives of San Francisco and all four of George’s grandparents were immigrants from Ireland who had settled in San Francisco by the 1870s. Interestingly, considering his later work in The Iron Horse, one of his grandfathers was apparently a laborer on the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1902 the O’Brien family was completed by the birth of George’s younger brother, Daniel J. Jr. George would always remain very close to his family. His father Dan was his greatest hero. In 1906, when George was a day away from his 7th birthday and dreaming about the cake that his mother had promised him, he was awakened by the sounds of an enormous earthquake. His father came in and told the two brothers to stay in bed. However before long it was obvious that this was no ordinary tremor. The San Francisco earthquake and its attendant fires destroyed much of the city.
The O’Briens lost their home and Dan his job. They had to live in a refugee camp set up in the hills for a while and later in a dance hall. However, Margie somehow found the makings of a birthday cake for George! George later related that the experience of the earthquake made him rather a quiet child – in contrast with his later reputation as a self-described “man of a few thousand words”. He also commented on how so many men at that time used the disruption caused by the quake to run out on their families. However Dan was not that sort of man. Even after he lost his job and was struggling, he was always on hand for his family. In 1908 George remembered hearing his father say to his mother “Margie, we’ve got to eat, I’m joining the police force. “
Dan rose rapidly in the police force. He seemed to have a natural talent for leadership as well as a stalwart bravery. By 1919 he was the acting Chief of Police and the next year was made Chief of Police. Meanwhile the rest of George’s childhood passed happily. He joined the Columbia Park Boy’s Club. It was with this organization that he had his first acting experience. The boys would take a play on tour in California towns (some very small indeed!) and in at least one of these performances, George apparently played the role of Maritana, a gypsy girl, in the 19th century opera of the same name!
During his years at Polytechnic High School, George excelled at all type of athletics. He also learned to ride while working with police horses. When George was 18, he joined the US Navy to serve his country in WWI. During this time, he battled his way to become the light-heavyweight boxing champion of the Navy’s Pacific fleet. He was a stretcher-bearer in the war, and he left the Navy with five decorations for bravery under fire. What a kid!
George left the Navy and returned home to San Francisco. His parents wanted him to go to college and he began courses at Santa Clara College, hoping to become a doctor. However during a rodeo, he met with Tom Mix, who told him that there were opportunities to work as a cameraman in Hollywood and promised to help him if he ever came south to Los Angeles. George had a restless nature in many ways and the chance to work outside appealed to him far more than slogging away inside a classroom. He told his father that he wished to give the movie industry a try. He always spoke of how wonderful his father was at this stage – encouraging him to do what he really wanted to do, rather than what his parents wanted for him.
Tom Mix was not in Hollywood when George arrived, but he found work anyway. He became an assistant cameraman, which tended to consist of lugging heavy cameras around. He roomed in Hollywood with a fellow San Franciscan, Mervyn Leroy, who later became a well-known director and producer.
He was laid off from his assistant cameraman in the general downturn the motion picture business went through in 1921. He came back to San Francisco. There he met Hobart Bosworth, who was filming a movie called White Hands in the SF Bay area. If you wanted to film in San Francisco of course, you needed to have police cooperation. This is probably how the meeting took place. Bosworth offered him a chance to be a stunt swimmer, wearing a metal fin to impersonate a shark. He also played a sailor and got to use his fists in some scenes of maritime brawling. Not long after this he did some more stunting and some acting in George Melford’s film Moran of the Lady Letty. In this film he did a spectacular fall from the yardarm of a ship, doubling for none other than Rudolph Valentino! He also played a deckhand who discovers and battles a fire on board ship – and gets a pretty good death scene too! This movie still exists and George is instantly recognizable!
George began to get more extra and bit parts, usually uncredited. However he was credited in a number of movies before his big breakthrough role in The Iron Horse. He even got a positive mention in Variety for his role in The Ne’er do Well, starring his father’s friend, Thomas Meighan. His role as Louis in the Pola Negri film Shadows of Paris also gathered him some more press notices. However George was getting a bit discouraged when the opportunity arose to try out for The Iron Horse, which was being directed by John Ford. George always loved to tell the tale of how he was cast in this breakthrough role. He was the 58th actor to try out for the role of Davy 
Brandon. He impressed Ford with his horsemanship, good looks and enthusiasm. Ford took a chance by casting a virtual unknown, but as the Fox executives looked at the footage coming in during the shooting, it was obvious that it was a good gamble. During the often difficult production of this film, George and John (always known as Jack) Ford became good friends, a friendship which would last (with some stresses) for the rest of their lives.
Fox Pictures gave George a contract and rushed him into one picture after another. He was billed as “Not a Sheik or a lounge lizard, but a man’s man and the idol of women”. Great emphasis was also given to “the George O’Brien smile”, which was reliably said to be “sweeping the country from sea to sea!” George received plenty of press coverage in newspapers and movie fan magazines. He was seen as an all-American clean cut young man, who was a tremendous athlete. From all accounts that was a pretty accurate description of the real George.
During this time George starred in popular movies such as 3 Bad Men, The Blue Eagle, Fig Leaves, Paid to Love, East Side West Side and The Man Who Came Back, to name a few. According to George, F.W. Murnau saw George’s performance in The Man Who Came Back, and decided to cast him as the role of The Man in Sunrise. The fact that George was under contract with Fox, and had previously starred in movies with Janet Gaynor made things all the more easier and convenient.
During the mid to late 1920s, George was in a relationship with Olive Borden. They had met during the filming of 3 Bad Men. Their relationship was pretty serious. It almost led to marriage, but for some reason, it didn’t work out. Some speculate that George matured during the filming of Sunrise, and Olive was none too happy about this. Others think that George’s parents did not care for the rather hard-partying, spendthrift Olive. Who really knows? Ultimately, the two went their separate ways, and George remained out of serious relationships for the next several years.
George would continue acting throughout the silent era. In 1928 he was loaned from Fox to Warner Brothers to play a lead role in one of the last silent extravaganzas, Noah’s Ark, directed by Michael Curtiz. After the movie was finished Warner Brothers decided to re-film some scenes and add talking sequences. George seemed to take this in stride, remarking later on that he was startled when he first heard himself speak – he sounded just like his brother Dan! George’s baritone voice and his San Francisco Irish accent (that’s his son Darcy’s description) were deemed acceptable by Variety and other newspapers of the time.
1929 was a tough year for silent actors. Fox Pictures was busily signing up Broadway talent (including a pretty red-headed ingénue named Marguerite Churchill), figuring that only actors who knew how to “talk” and “enunciate” would be successful in the new talking era. George later 
recalled that the rumor was that all the silent actors and actresses and directors too would be let go. George made some silent pictures that year and also took a trip to Annapolis, Maryland with Jack Ford to film his first all-talkie Salute.
There were some rumors that he might be let go when his contract came up, but before that time Fox decided to star him in a remake of one of Tom Mix’s old westerns: The Lone Star Ranger. George had been in three westerns during the silent era, but he was not known as a western actor. In fact in 1928 it was noted in an article that he had escaped the typecasting that so many actors were prey to. He said how much he enjoyed playing different types of characters. The enormous success of The Lone Star Ranger changed that. His contract was renewed and he was relaunched as a western star.
It is important to note that these Fox pictures were not “B” westerns. They were given big budgets and entailed location shooting. In fact some of George’s friends joked that he should have voted in the 1932 election in Arizona rather than in California, because he spent most of his time in the former state. George loved the location shooting and the chance to test his horsemanship with daring stunts. The early talkies tended very much to be ‘studio-bound” – which was in contrast to the silents, which often were shot outdoors. Going in to a studio in the morning and coming out after the sun had gone down would not have suited George O’Brien! He was still a big star at this time, his comings and goings reported in the press and his picture appearing in all the movie magazines.
Unfortunately Fox Pictures was not in good financial shape during these years. The budgets on George’s pictures went down as the years progressed. By 1934 he finished his last Fox contract. However since he was extremely popular, especially in rural areas and small towns, an agreement was reached where he would make films produced independently by Sol Lesser and released by Fox. George’s contracts were always well-negotiated, first by his father Dan and later by his brother Dan (who, most conveniently, was a lawyer). He was making very good money in the 1930s.
But plenty of work wasn’t the only cause for celebration. During filming of Riders of the Purple Sage, George met Marguerite Churchill. Two years later, in 1933 they married in the Mission
Church of Santa Ynez in Solvang California. Not long after their marriage, George’s beloved father, Dan, who had been suffering from ill health for some years, died at the early age of 58. This was a terrible blow for George and his family. However a happy moment soon arrived, when their first son Brian was born in 1934. What joy the lovely couple must have felt! There are reports of George seen out celebrating a few days after the birth with his mother, brother and sister-in-law. Sadly, their joy was short lived. Brian contracted pneumonia. Ten days after his parents welcomed him into the world, baby Brian died. One could only imagine the heart break and devastation the O’Briens must have suffered.
Not too long after however, the couple welcomed another child into their lives. Their daughter Orin was born in 1935. For the next few years, George kept himself busy with acting roles. After the Sol Lesser produced movies, he moved into independent production under the producer George Hirliman. In these movies he frequently played western roles, but he tried to vary the films, sometimes playing railroad men or dam construction workers – but always emphasizing outdoor action, with lots of good fistfights and daring stunts. The other element that all of George’s films had in plenty was humor. He was a gifted comic actor and his sense of fun is always on display in these films of the later 1930s. In 1938, he signed a contract to do western films for RKO. These were “B” westerns and are considered some of the best ever made.
He and Marguerite built a ranch in the Decker canyon overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A few years later in 1939 their son Darcy was born. Even though Brian had passed away, George always said he had three children. He never forgot his little one who had not made it. At that point, the O’Brien family was complete. George had wanted another “DOB” like his father Dan O’Brien, but the name Dan already belonged to his brother, Dan Jr. and his nephew Dan III. He decided to name Darcy for his father’s mother who had been born Mary D’Arcy. The apostrophe, however, went missing somewhere along the line!