Rex Ingram

Biography

Rex Ingram’s real name was Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock. He took his pseudonym only after reaching America.

He was born in Dublin; the year of birth is more often given as 1892, though 1893 also appears. He was educated at Saint Columba’s College near Rathfarnham, and spent his youth in the Old Rectory at Kinnitty, County Offaly, where his father served in the Church of Ireland. His elder brother Francis joined the British Army, fought in the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross.

In 1911 Ingram emigrated to the United States. He enrolled at the Yale University School of Art, studied sculpture and contributed to the campus humour magazine The Yale Record. He did not give up sculpture later: he returned to it after leaving the cinema.

He came to film in 1913 as an actor, then wrote scripts, produced and directed. As a producer-director he made his debut in 1916 with the romantic drama “The Great Problem”. He worked for Edison, Fox and Vitagraph, then for Metro, which he joined in 1920. There his supervisor was the screenwriter and executive June Mathis. Together they made four films: “Hearts Are Trumps”, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, “The Conquering Power” and “Turn to the Right”. “The Four Horsemen” (1921), with Rudolph Valentino, was a great commercial success, and after it Ingram was able to work more freely: “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1922) and “Scaramouche” (1923). It is said that there was a personal relationship between him and Mathis as well, but this is hard to verify. They grew apart as Valentino’s fame began to overshadow his own as a director.

His first marriage, to the actress Doris Pawn (1917), ended in divorce in 1920. In 1921 Ingram married the actress Alice Terry, who appeared in his films; they stayed together for the rest of his life.

In 1923 they moved to the French Riviera. In Nice they set up a small studio and made films for MGM and other companies on location in North Africa, Spain and Italy; “Mare Nostrum” (1926) was among them. At the Nice studio the young Michael Powell worked for him, later the director of “The Red Shoes” (with Emeric Pressburger). Powell himself said that Ingram had been a major influence on him, especially in the themes of illusion, dreaming, magic and the surreal. David Lean also acknowledged a debt to him. Erich von Stroheim called Ingram “the world’s greatest director”, and Dore Schary, head of MGM, in his list of the leading creative people in Hollywood placed him second, after David Wark Griffith and ahead of Cecil B. DeMille and Stroheim himself.

With the coming of sound, Ingram did not convert his Nice studios and preferred to travel and write. His only sound film, “Baroud” (1932), was made in Morocco for Gaumont British Pictures; it was not a commercial success. After that he left the film business and returned to Los Angeles, where he worked as a sculptor and writer. He had been interested in Islam since 1927 and converted to it in 1933.

Ingram died on 21 July 1950 in North Hollywood. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. For his contribution to the cinema he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1651 Vine Street.