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Wallace Reid, born April 15, 1891 in St. Louis,
Missouri, United States - died January 18, 1923 in
Hollywood, California, was an actor in silent film
referred to by Motion Picture Magazine as "the
screen's most perfect lover".

==Biography==

Born William Wallace Reid into a show business
family, his mother Bertha Westbrook was an actress
and his father, Hal Reid,  worked successfully in
a variety of theatrical jobs, travelling the
country. As a boy, Wallace Reid was performing on
stage at an early age but acting was put on hold
while he obtained an education at Freehold
Military School in Freehold, New Jersey. A gifted
all-around athlete, Reid participated in a number
of sports while also following an interest in
music, learning to play the piano, banjo, drums,
and the violin. As a teenager, he spent time in
Wyoming where he learned to be an outdoorsman. 

Drawn to the burgeoning motion picture industry by
his father who would shift from the theatre to
acting, writing, and directing films, in 1910, a
19-year-old Wallace Reid appeared in his first
motion picture called The Phoenix, an adaptation
of a Milton Nobles  play filmed at Selig Polyscope
Studios in Chicago. Hooked on making films, Reid
used the script from a play his father had written
and approached the very successful Vitagraph
Studios hoping to be given the opportunity to
direct. Instead, Vitagraph executives capitalized
on his sex appeal and in addition to having him
direct, they cast him in a major role. Although
Reid's good looks and powerful physique made him
the perfect "matinee idol," he was equally happy
with roles behind the scenes and often worked as a
writer, cameraman, and director.

Wallace Reid appeared in several films with his
father and as his career in film flourished, he
was soon acting and directing with and for early
film mogul, Allan Dwan.  In 1913, while at
Universal Studios|Universal Pictures, Reid met and
married actress Dorothy Davenport (1895-1977). In
1915-16 he performed in both masterpieces from
director D.W. Griffith and starred opposite
leading ladies such as Florence Turner, Gloria
Swanson, Lillian Gish, Elsie Ferguson, and
Geraldine Farrar en route to becoming one of
Hollywood's major heartthrobs.

Already involved with the creation of more than a
hundred motion picture shorts, Reid was signed by
producer Jesse L. Lasky and would star in another
sixty plus films for Lasky's Famous Players film
company. His action hero role as the dashing race
car driver saw young girls and older women alike
flocking to theaters to see his daredevil auto
thrillers such as the 1919 hit, The Roaring Road,
the two 1920 successes, Double Speed and Excuse My
Dust, and in the same genre in 1921,  Too Much
Speed.

However, in 1919, while working on location in
Oregon, Reid was injured in a train wreck and in
order to keep on filming he was prescribed
morphine for his pain. The powerful drug almost
immediately led to a deadly addiction but Reid
kept on working at a frantic pace in films that
were growing more physically demanding and
changing from 15-20 minutes in duration to as much
as an hour.  Reid's morphine dependency deepened
at a time when proper help for any form of
addiction was non-existent. By late 1922 his
health had deteriorated badly and after
contracting the flu, he fell into a coma from
which he never recovered.

Dead at age thirty-one, Wallace Reid was interred
in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in
Glendale, California.

Unlike the self-destructive behavior of other
stars of that era such as Barbara La Marr, Jack
Pickford and Jeanne Eagels whose death resulted
from drugs and/or alcohol abuse, historical
records point to Wallace Reid being a victim of
medical ignorance. A happy, well-adjusted man, he
had been close to his parents and was dedicated to
his wife and children. Beyond the adoration of
moviegoers, Wallace Reid was admired and respected
by fellow actors as well as the studio executives
who employed him. Deaths like his were almost
always covered up by the film studios, but his
widow made his tragic story known in a 1923 film
titled Human Wreckage.

Wallace Reid's contribution to the motion-picture
industry has been recognized with a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.

==Filmography==
*Indian Romeo and Juliet (1912)
*Jean Intervenes  (1912)
*The Picture of Dorian Gray  (1913)
*The Deerslayer  (1913)
*Carmen (silent film)|Carmen (1915)
*Old Heidelberg  (1915)
*The Birth of a Nation  (1915)
*Intolerance (movie)|Intolerance  (1916)
*Big Timber   (1917)
*The Prison Without Walls   (1917)
*The House of Silence  (1918)
*Hawthorne of the USA  (1919)
*Forever (silent film)|Forever  (1921)
*The Affairs Of Anatol  (1921)
*Across the Continent  (1922)

==External links==
* imdb|id=0717468|name=Wallace Reid