Rex Ingram (actor)
Rex Ingram ( born October 20, 1895 in Cairo, Illinois, † September 19, 1969 in Hollywood, California ) was an American actor.
Life
Ingram's father worked as a stoker on a Mississippi steamboat and Rex spent much of his childhood and youth accompanied his father on the Mississippi River. Ingram graduated from Northwestern University Medical and went to California after graduation. There he was discovered on the street for a Tarzan movie with Elmo Lincoln and played in some smaller silent movie roles. His breakthrough as an actor, he saw, however, only with the introduction of sound. His deep, powerful voice and physical presence earned him impressive roles. His breakthrough came with the role of the slave Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Richard Thorpe in 1939.
In 1929 he made his Broadway debut on the stage and played until 1961 in more than a dozen Broadway productions. He was a 1940 world premiere cast of the musical Cabin in the Sky and played his role in the film adaptation of Vincente Minnelli 1943. 1957 he starred in the Broadway premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot the Pozzo.
In 1949 he was imprisoned because of the so-called man acts and spent ten months in jail. This condemnation took a break in his career and needed by the end of the 1950s, to get back serious role offers. In the 1960s, he was seen primarily in television series and 1962 was the first black man who was seen in an American soap opera. When he first appeared in The Brighter Day on the screen, this led to a scandal. The Brighter Day ran since 1954 and was the first successful soap opera on American television. The series was taken off the air by CBS after his first appearance in 1962 one month later completely.
Rex Ingram died in 1969 at the age of 73 from a heart attack.