Saturdays with the Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  In our last season, focused on America's Sweethearts, we started with Mary Pickford, who was the first film star to bear that title, and would become one half of Hollywood's first celebrity supercouple, a trend that continues even today with people like Ryan Reynolds & Blake Lively or Beyonce & Jay-Z.  It seems fitting, then, that our seventh season, in some ways the masculine ying to last season's feminine yang, starts with the man she shared the distinction of being part of Hollywood's first supercouple with, the man who would dominate the 1920's as one of the decade's biggest names.  This month's star is Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of a broken home as his father quickly left when Douglas and his brother were just children.  He took on the name Fairbanks after his mother remarried, but kept it in part to hide the Jewish identity that he never publicly acknowledged from his father.  He began acting as a teenager, appearing in local theater and summer stock productions before moving to New York, where he became a regular player on Broadway and married his first wife Anna Beth Sully, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and had his only child (future movie star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.).  The Fairbanks family would end up in Los Angeles in 1915, and quickly after Fairbanks would make a name for himself playing athletic roles under contract to Paramount, where he would become the biggest star in Hollywood (give or take his new wife Mary).

Most of our stars this year I am very familiar with their careers, in some cases having seen literally dozens of their movies.  So it seems like a fun start to go with an actor I've only seen in two movies (Intolerance and The Taming of the Shrew).  Fairbanks would become not just a big star, but in many ways the template for future action stars-taking on big, iconic roles like Zorro and Robin Hood that we still see in movies today.  He would also have a relatively scandalous personal life, one that was covered by the veneer of respectability his "America's Sweetheart" wife would bring with him, which we will also talk about as we look at our first action hero leading man.