Frederick Warde
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Frederick Barkham Warde (23 February 1851, Wardington, Oxfordshire, England - 7 February 1935, Brooklyn, New York) was a Shakesperian actor who moved from Britain to the United States in the late 1800s. He had two notable achievements, one being the "discovery" of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and persuading him to move from Denver to join Warde's New York City actors troupe.
The second achievement was as the star of Richard III (1912), based on the play by William Shakespeare. This 55-minute film was re-discovered in 1996 by a private film collector who donated it to the American Film Institute archive. The film is thought to be the earliest surviving American feature film. Another of his films was A Lover's Oath (filmed in 1921 and premiered four years later), opposite Ramon Novarro, in which he portrayed Omar Khayyám. It is regarded as a lost film.
Warde also recorded an early sound film Frederick Warde Reads Poem, A Sunset Reverie (1921) which was made in the short-lived sound-on-disc Phono-Kinema process.
