Mordaunt Hall

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Mordaunt Hall (1 November 1878 – 2 July 1973)[1] was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for the New York Times, from October 1924 to September 1934.[2]

Born Frederick William Mordaunt Hall in Guildford, Surrey, England,[3] and known to his friends as "Freddie", he later claimed his full name was Frederick Wentworth Mordaunt Hall.[4] His father was a school headmaster in Tottenham.[5]

Hall worked as an advance agent for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show circa 1907, by which time he was already referred to as "an old newspaper man."[6] He worked at the New York Press from 1909 to 1914, when he joined the New York Herald. In 1909 the theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein I accused Hall and another reporter of assaulting him outside the Hotel Knickerbocker.[7]

Hall was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War I, and did intelligence work. He wrote about his wartime experiences in the book Some Naval Yarns (1917). He returned from service in 1919.[8]

He was married to Helen Rowe, an American.[9]

In the early 1920s, Hall wrote movie intertitles, with young Alfred Hitchcock designing and lettering them, at the Famous Players-Lasky studio in Islington, England.[10] Hall's byline first appeared in the New York Times in 1922. After retiring from the Times in 1934, he hosted a New York radio program on movies and movie players in 1934–1935, and was a drama critic for the Boston Transcript from 1936 to 1938.[11] He was working for the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York in 1942.[12] He later joined the Bell Syndicate as a copy editor, and occasionally wrote articles.[13] He died in New York City at age 94.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Social Security Death Index.
  2. ^ "Mordaunt Hall, Wrote of Screen," New York Times, July 4, 1973, p. 18.
  3. ^ Free BMD. Ancestry.com and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1881 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Mordaunt Hall was the name of an 1849 novel by English author Anne Marsh-Caldwell.
  4. ^ Inventory of Sardi's Caricatures, 1925–1952, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.
  5. ^ Ancestry.com. 1891 England Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2005.
  6. ^ "Personal and Social" (column), The Evening Times, Cumberland, Maryland, Sept. 12, 1907, p. 8.
  7. ^ The case was suspended when Hammerstein left for Europe. "City Brevities," New York Times, May 15, 1909, p. 5.
  8. ^ Ancestry.com. Border Crossings: From Canada to U.S., 1895-1956 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2007.
  9. ^ Passenger list of the S.S. Orotava, Port of New York, Dec. 20, 1909. Passenger list of the S.S. Homeric, Port of New York, 4 May 1922, sheet 6, line 6.
  10. ^ Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Da Capo Press, 1999, p. 55. ISBN 030680932X. John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, Da Capo Press, 1996, p. 39. ISBN 0306806770.
  11. ^ Wood Soanes, Curtain Calls (syndicated column), Oct. 16, 1936. Walter Winchell, On Broadway (syndicated column), Sept. 27, 1938.
  12. ^ Ancestry.com. U.S. World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2007.
  13. ^ E.g., guest writing Ray Tucker's syndicated column "The National Whirligig" on Dec. 2, 1955.

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