User:Lord Bolingbroke/John Bunny

John Bunny (September 21, 1863 – April 26, 1915) was an American actor. Bunny began his career as a stage actor, but transitioned to a film career after joining Vitagraph Studios around 1910. At Vitagraph, Bunny made over 150 short films—many of them domestic comedies with the comedian Flora Finch—and became one of the most well-known actors of his era.

Life and career
Bunny was born in Brooklyn and educated in New York public schools. The son of an English father and Irish mother, he initially worked as a clerk in a general store before joining a small minstrel show at the age of twenty. In a stage career spanning 25 years, Bunny worked for theater companies across the U.S. and "ran the theatrical gamut from minstrelsy to Shakespeare". In 1892, Bunny became a member of Cordray's Stock Company and performed in Portland and Seattle for several months before leaving for an unspecified engagement in New York. From 1897–1898, Bunny was manager and director at the Grand Opera House in Salt Lake City. 1898–1905: stage manager and director for William Brady's productions, including Way Down East. 1905–1908: with Henry W. Savage's company (Easy Dawson, Tom Jones). 1909–1910: with Lew Fields' company in Old Dutch. Bunny eventually worked his way into Broadway, where his first recorded performance was in Aunt Hannah (1900) at the Bijou Theatre. Other Broadway appearances included Easy Dawson (1905), which The New York Times deemed a "strange mixture" that did not fall within the lead actor, Raymond Hitchcock's, usual purview of musical comedy; the Astor Theatre's inaugural production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1906), where Bunny's performance as Bottom garnered acclaim; and Old Dutch (1909), a musical farce that featured Lew Fields alongside Vernon Castle and a young Helen Hayes.



Bunny's screen debut came sometime around 1910. In a 1915 interview, Bunny recounted how he decided to enter the film industry after determining that "it was the 'movies' that were the main cause of the lean times on stage." Despite the stigma sill surrounding film acting at this time—to move "[f]rom Shakespearean roles to the motion picture was perhaps something of a drop" in the words of the early film historian Terry Ramsaye—Bunny offered his services to Vitagraph Studios, but was refused a job because the studio manager believed he could not offer Bunny a high enough salary. Bunny, however, insisted on taking the lower pay and began working at Vitagraph Studios around 1910, where he went on to star in over 150 films.

At Vitagraph, Bunny was often paired with the comedian Flora Finch, with whom he made many popular comedies that came to be known as "Bunnygraphs" or "Bunnyfinches". According to the Library of Congress, this genre was exemplified by Bunny's film A Cure for Pokeritis (1912), in which a man's desire to play poker is thwarted by his fastidious wife. Another collaboration with Finch was in The Schemers (1913). In order to sneak out of the house to go to the club, Bunny places a dummy in his bead, which his wife (Finch) mistakes for a burglar. Bunny then commences a strenuous "fight" with the intruder, and is greeted as a hero by his wife.


 * May 1912: Bunny sails for England in order to film The Pickwick Papers, based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same name.
 * August 1912: Bunny returns to New York.
 * September 1912: Upon his return, Bunny became a founding member of the Screen Club, a social organization "founded with the triple purpose of unity, advancement and preservation of the motion picture art".
 * January 1913: begins engagement as monologist at Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre.
 * Spring 1913: new contract negotiated, returns to Vitagraph with higher pay (?).
 * September 1913: Bunny, along with Lillian Walker, crowned king of Mardi Gras for a record crowd of 350,000 people.
 * October 1913: Returns to Victoria Theatre.
 * Summer 1914: Bunny leaves Vitagraph to star in Bunny in Funnyland. Opened on September 9.
 * February 1915: Bunny's last Vitagraph appearance, How Cissy Made Good, was released on February 2, 1915. Plays himself being interviewed by a reporter from Motion Picture Magazine.
 * March 1915: Returns to stage with the John Bunny Show.

Bunny had been acting in films for only five years when he died from Bright's disease at his home in Brooklyn on April 26, 1915. He was survived by his wife and two sons and interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.

Contemporary reception
Bunny was one of the most well known actors of his lifetime. A New York Times editorial published after Bunny's death noted that thousands recognized him as "the living symbol of wholesome merriment", and declared: "Wherever movies are exhibited, and that is everywhere, Bunny had his public. It is perfectly safe to say that no other camera actor was as popular in this country." The actress Frances Agnew wrote in 1913 that "Mr. Bunny's name is a household word, not only from coast to coast in America, but also in every city and town in the world at all acquainted with the 'movies,' ..." Bunny's worldwide reach was also noted by a critic for the Saturday Review: "When Mr. Bunny laughs, people from San Francisco to Stepney Green laugh with him. When Mr. Bunny frowns, every kingdom of the earth is contracted in one brow of woe."

Bunny's skills as an actor were praised by his contemporaries. In particular, his ability to convey emotion without the use of words drew comment from critics. John Palmer of the Saturday Review declared, "Mr. Bunny has an extensive and extremely flexible face. ... We know at once why Mr. Bunny never speaks. He could not possibly find words to convey the extremity of his feelings." According to The New York World, "The advent of the film drama found him particularly well endowed for the new art of acting without words. The range of his facial expression was altogether wonderful, and when the emotion of the moment had told its story in his features there was nothing left for the words to do." The poet and writer Joyce Kilmer wrote glowingly of Bunny's acting ability, and claimed that Bunny was responsible for reviving the art of pantomime. The poet and early film critic Vachel Lindsay said Bunny occupied an "important place" in his memory, and called the acting in one of Bunny's films "delightful".

Bunny helped bring legitimacy to film at a time when the fledgling medium was still often regarded as a lower form of entertainment. A 1916 Washington Times article claimed, "To John Bunny ... must be given the credit of presenting the first bits of refined comedy in photoplay. Previous to his advent into screenland film comedies were either 'chases' or grotesque trick photography. He rescued screen humor from the chamber of horrors and placed it in the hall of fame". Bunny's obituary in The Moving Picture World proclaimed, "His work as a comedian was always clean in character and furnished amusement of the most wholesome nature." In the words of his contemporary Henry Lanier, Bunny demonstrated "that a real actor can make an incredible success before [a film] audience without any of the vulgarity or horseplay which used to be considered essential."

Despite his genial on-screen persona, Bunny was disliked by his fellow actors at Vitagraph. Bunny and Finch "cordially hated each other" according to Vitagraph's co-founder Albert E. Smith, and interviews of former Vitagraph personnel revealed that his co-workers found him arrogant, bad-tempered, and difficult to work with. The actress Helen Hayes—who as a child appeared with Bunny in Old Dutch (1909) on Broadway—wrote in her autobiography that everyone on the cast was kind to her except Bunny. She recalled how Bunny "gluttonized, snorted, and slept when he wasn't on stage", and that he needed to be awakened from sleep to meet his cues. Bunny's on-the-job somnolence apparently continued into his film career, a trait that made him difficult to direct. As William Basil Courtney wrote in 1925, "The commonest sight in the yard was Bunny's four-dimension figure standing as nearly stark upright as such a figure could, and held steady by one hand resting on the tank railing, while he slept and snored in peaceful indifference to the hurry and scurry around him."

Legacy and scholarly analysis
The film scholar Anthony Slide credits Bunny as "the first internationally recognized film comedian." Slide's assessment is at odds with that of McCaffrey and Jacobs, who write, "While the French actor Max Linder was considered the first international comedian, Bunny became the first comic star in the United States." This is echoed by the film scholar Wes Gehring, who notes that early film comedy was dominated by the French, in particular Max Linder and Georges Méliès, and writes that "[i]t was only in the second decade of the century that American film comedy began to take over the world market."

At the time Bunny entered the film industry, the identities of film players were not considered important enough to feature in advertising. According to his obituary in Motion Picture News, "John Bunny was the first motion picture comedian to be personally advertised. That and his appearance in Vitagraph comedies made his face loved and familiar the world over." As put by Terry Ramsaye in 1926, "Bunny was among the earliest players really starred. Since he appeared in comedies written around him and his vast girth, it was a logical step to include his name in the titles, giving him an early entry into screen publicity." The film scholar Wes Gehring also notes that Bunny's films frequently featured his name in the title (e.g., Bunny and the Dogs or Bunny's Birthday Surprise), arguing that this is because of the personality focus of Bunny's films, which feature a subordination of story to character, in contrast to a more thematic approach to comedy. The personality focus of Bunny's films was described in 1914 by the screenwriter Catherine Carr: "In most big companies at the present day there are maintained actors around whose personality comedies are being written; i.e., John Bunny, Flora Finch, etc. These actors take the mere germ of a comedy and develop it through their clever acting into a screen production that brings laughter wherever it is shown."

According to Gehring, "Bunny helped elevate at the time what was still often considered a second-class medium to a level of artistic significance". The genteel nature of Bunny's comedy was not so positively received by Slide, however, who writes that Bunny's "characterizations contain nothing creative, and he uses no knockabout or slapstick comedy. His comedy is all very middle class and very polite. Often so dull is the storyline that the comedy is difficult to uncover. Time and again one wonders if audiences ever did laugh at his work, and, if so, why?"

According to Gehring, "Bunny and Finch represent the beginning of what could be called the domestic film comedy".

According to Doug Riblet, Bunny was one of the first actors to have a consistent comedic persona across his films. Gehring contends that Bunny was "the first in a long line of American personality screen comedians", whose approach is marked by a "subordination of story to character". Frank Scheide writes, "Very much a physical comedian, Bunny's humor was based more on comedy of manners than slapstick. In the handful of surviving pictures from the 174 he made, Bunny sometimes plays a likable and sympathetic character despite his flaws. The nature of Bunny's performance also affected how his films were presented. Medium or tight long shots framed Bunny's body language to best advantage, and were held long enough for the comedian to convey his facial reactions to a given situation adequately. This resulted in an intimate narrative with a moderate tempo very different from the rapid pacing of a chase filmed in more distancing long shots." Scheide sees this comedy of manners as a "polite" and "respectable" form of situational comedy in contrast to the "decidedly lowbrow, crass, and often violent" humor of slapstick films.

Following Bunny's passing, new comedic stars came to the fore in silent film and Bunny fell into obscurity. However, he was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his contributions to the film industry with a motion pictures star located at 1715 Vine Street in Hollywood.

Selected filmography
The following filmography is primarily based on a list of Bunny's films compiled by the historian and archivist Sam Gill, who gathered his information from original Vitagraph company bulletins and cast lists. Discrepancies in sources are described in the "notes" column where appropriate.