German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1760/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Freulich / Universal-Matador.
Norman Kerry in
Merry-Go-Round (Rupert Julian, Erich von Stroheim, 1923).
Norman Kerry (1894–1956) was an American actor of the silent era, who peaked in the Lon Chaney films
The Hunchback of the Notre Dame (1923),
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and
The Unknown (1927).
Of German origin, and born Arnold Kaiser in Rochester in New York State on June 16, 1894, Kerry changed his name to Norman Kerry during the First World War. Kerry began working as a clerk in the New York fur trade, but felt that he had no aptitude for this type of work, he left everything and became a theatrical agent. In 1916, he met Rudolph Valentino, and the two soon became friends and it was Kerry who advised the Italian to try his hand at the young film industry. Kerry played his first part in the Douglas Fairbanks film Manhattan Madness (Allan Dwan, 1916), but immediately after he had an important lead in the Mary Pickford film A Little Princess (Marshall Neilan, 1917). A second success followed with the Constance Talmadge film Up the Road with Sallie (William Desmond Taylor, 1918).
Norman Kerry became a matinee idol with his slicked-back hair and thin, waxed mustache. His popularity peaked in 1923, when he acted as the dashing Captain Phoebus in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), starring Lon Chaney and Patsy Ruth Miller, and as the aristocrat posing as a salesman in Merry-Go-Round (Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian, 1923), with Mary Philbin as his love interest. Kerry was again paired with Philbin in another Lon Chaney classic, The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925). The third get-together with Chaney happened with the bizarre horror film The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927), starring Chaney and Joan Crawford. Kerry plays Chaney's rival as a strongman, risking to be ripped apart in a circus act when Chaney's character takes revenge for having needlessly removed his both own arms. Kerry continued to appear in several films and alongside the leading actresses of the moment, including Lillian Gish in Annie Laurie (John S. Robertson, 1927), Bebe Daniels, Irene Rich, Eleanor Boardman, Corinne Griffith, Pauline Starke, Aileen Pringle, and many others.
Norman Kerry was not so lucky in his personal life as he married three times. With the advent of sound cinema, he did not have the desired success, and after 1931 he stopped. Having acted in 1928 in the film Foreign Legion, Kerry drew his conclusions and joined the real French Foreign Legion. He returned to the United States only in 1940, when France was invaded by Hitler's Nazi army and acted in one last film. Norman Kerry died in Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of 61, the victim of liver disease.
Sources: Wikipedia (English and Italian ), and IMDb.
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