Roy D'Arcy

Roy D'Arcy (10 February 1894 – 15 November 1969) was an American film actor of the silent film and early sound period of the 1930s noted for his portrayal of flamboyant villains. He appeared in 50 different films between 1925 and 1939, such as The Temptress in 1926 with actresses such as Greta Garbo.
[edit] Biography

Roy D'Arcy was born as Roy Francis Giusti in San Francisco but educated in Europe and studied painting in Paris. After several years of traveling and various business ventures in South America and Asia he returned to the United States and decided to become involved in the theater. He was hired as a singer in several touring theatrical companies. He spent some time in vaudeville as a monologist, and took his act to Europe and Asia.[citation needed]

D'Arcy was performing his show on a Los Angeles stage when he was spotted by director Erich von Stroheim, who thought D'Arcy was just right for the part of the villainous, arrogant Prince Mirko in The Merry Widow. Von Stroheim had wanted to play the part himself, but was forbidden from doing so by MGM production head Irving Thalberg.[citation needed] It was a troubled production - from which von Stroheim was fired, brought back, then fired again - but the film was a great critical and financial success, and D'Arcy received wide acclaim for his portrayal of the dissolute Mirko.[citation needed]

With the success of film he was cast in several other MGM productions as the head villain, such as Beverly of Graustark (1925), La Bohème (1926) and The Temptress (1926) alongside Greta Garbo, but he soon appeared in such comedies as Adam and Evil (1927) and On Ze Boulevard (1927). He developed a revue he took to Broadway in 1928, called "The Greatest Array of Talent Ever Assembled on Any Bill in This Country", which consisted of singers, dancers, and D'Arcy himself walking out into the audience and telling stories of his travels around the world.[citation needed]

D'Arcy made the transition from silent film very well, and played a succession of foreigners, both villainous and otherwise, in films of the early 1930s.[citation needed] However, as acting styles changed because of the introduction of sound, D'Arcy's unique florid style went out of fashion, and in a few years he was reduced to doing small, low-budget pictures for lower independent studios, such as Broadway to Cheyenne (1932) for Monogram Pictures and Discarded Lovers (1932) for Tower Pictures. He did though have noted roles in a serial for Mascot Pictures Corporation, The Shadow of the Eagle (1932), starring a young John Wayne, and in his second serial, The Whispering Shadow (1933) with Bela Lugosi.[citation needed]

By the mid 1930s D'Arcy continued playing villainous roles in a number of low-budget productions including Revolt of the Zombies (1936), Captain Calamity (1936) and Under Strange Flags (1937). His final film was to be a major one, in the Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musical The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle in 1939 which received widespread acclaim.

Finishing his film career around the age of 45, D'Arcy retired to his own real estate business. He died in 1969.