Queer Places:
Welwood Murray Cemetery, Vine Ave, Palm Springs, CA 92262
Charles
Farrell (August 9, 1900 – May 6, 1990)[1]
was an American film actor of the 1920s silent era and into the 1930s, and
later a television actor. Farrell is probably best recalled for his onscreen
romances with actress Janet
Gaynor in more than a dozen films, including 7th Heaven, Street
Angel, and Lucky Star.
Born in Walpole, Massachusetts,[2] he began his career in Hollywood as a bit player for Paramount Pictures. Farrell did extra work for films ranging from The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney, Sr., Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, and The Cheat with Pola Negri.
Farrell continued to work throughout the next few years in relatively minor roles without much success until he was signed by Fox Studios and was paired with fellow newcomer Janet Gaynor in the romantic drama 7th Heaven. The film was a public and critical success and Farrell and Gaynor would go on to star opposite one another in more than a dozen films throughout the late 1920s and into the talkie era of the early 1930s. Unlike many of his silent screen peers, Farrell had little difficulty with "voice troubles" and remained a publicly popular actor throughout the sound era.
During the early 1950s, a decade after his career in motion pictures had ended, Farrell began appearing on the television series My Little Margie, which aired on CBS and NBC between 1952 and 1955. He played the role of the widower Vern Albright, the father of a young woman, Margie Albright, with a knack for getting into trouble, portrayed by Gale Storm. In 1956, Farrell starred in his own television program, The Charles Farrell Show.[3]
Farrell was romantically involved with Janet Gaynor, with whom he starred in twelve films, from about 1926 until her first marriage in 1929. Shaken by the death of his close friend, actor Fred Thomson, Farrell proposed marriage to Gaynor around 1928, but the couple was never married. Years later, Gaynor explained her breakup with Farrell: "I think we loved each other more than we were 'in love.' He played polo, he went to the Hearst Ranch for wild weekends with Marion Davies, he got around to the parties - he was a big, brawny, outdoors type... I was not a party girl... Charlie pressed me to marry him, but we had too many differences. In my era, you didn't live together. It just wasn't done. So I married a San Francisco businessman, Lydell Peck, just to get away from Charlie."[4]
Farrell married former actress Virginia Valli on February 14, 1931; the couple were married until Valli’s death from a stroke on September 24, 1968.
In the 1930s, Farrell became a resident of the desert city of Palm Springs, California. In 1934, he opened the popular Palm Springs Racquet Club in the city with his business partner, fellow actor Ralph Bellamy.[5]
A major player in the developing prosperity of Palm Springs in the 1930s through the 1960s, Farrell was elected to the city council in 1946 and elected mayor of the community in 1948, a position that he held until he submitted his resignation in 1953 to devote himself to his television series, My Little Margie.
Farrell died May 6, 1990, at the age of 89 from heart failure in Palm Springs[1] where he was interred at the Welwood Murray Cemetery.[6]
My published books:
