Snitz Edwards

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Out Yonder 1919 The Woman God Forgot 1917 That Model from Paris 1926 For Better for Worse 1919 Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall 1924

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snitz-edwards

Snitz Edwards

Snitz Edwards (January 1, 1868 - May 1, 1937) was a Hungarian born character actor.

Snitz Edwards starred in critically acclaimed films and supported such major stars as Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and many others.

Two films featuring Snitz Edwards were selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant": The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Four films featuring Snitz Edwards are in the list of The Top 100 Silent Era Films of the influential website Silent Era: The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Seven Chances (1925).

Update:

We have credible evidence in the form of two photographs that Snitz Edwards acted for "The General" (1926), the great Civil War masterpiece of Buster Keaton. The scenes that he was in were not included in the final cut of the film. Still, unlike any other film site, we believe that Snitz Edwards must be given credit for this film and we have included "The General" in his filmography. The two pictures with Snitz Edwards and Buster Keaton in "The General" can be seen in the slide show. They are significant for another reason as well: they show that the partnership between Snitz Edwards and Buster Keaton went beyond the three masterpieces Seven Chances (1925), Battling Butler (1926) and College (1927).

Update II:

We have credible evidence in the form of one photograph (see below in the slideshow) and contemporary newspaper articles that Snitz Edwards acted for "The Splendid Road" (1925), together with our star Marceline Day! He performed the role of a Chinese character named Hop Lee. We have accordingly updated his filmography.

Here is a biographical sketch of Snitz Edwards, written by his great grandson Anderson Toone and his granddaughter Laurel Humphreys Thurston. Please note that the date of birth of Snitz Edwards in this bio differs from the one on the major movie websites. Also, we watched the film Dorothy Vernon Of Haddon Hall (1924), but we did not see Snitz Edwards in it, as the article suggests.

Snitz Edwards

Born December 31, 1862 Budapest, Hungary
Died 1937 Los Angeles, CA

Snitz Edwards was diminutive, energetic, and hilarious. He generally played sidekicks or valet types.

He started in films in 1920, in The City of Masks. He later appeared in Ladies Must Live (Paramount, 1921), with Leatrice Joy and Jack Gilbert. He received a rave notice in the Variety Film Review (as a bit character actor).

He supported Mary Pickford in two films, Rosita (United Artists, 1923), directed by Ernst Lubitsch (in his first American effort), and Dorothy Vernon Of Haddon Hall (United Artists, 1924), directed by Marshall Neilan. He appeared in the epic film Souls for Sale (Goldwyn, 1923), with a huge cast that included Eleanor Boardman, Mae Busch, Barbara Lamarr, Richard Dix, Lew Cody, William Haines and Aileen Pringle.

He most famously played The Evil Associate, sidekick to to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in The Thief of Bagdad (United Artists, 1924). In 1925 Edwards appeared in Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera (Universal).

Snitz Edwards joined the Buster Keaton stock company in 1925. Snitz, incidentally, was one of Buster's favorite character men. He supported Buster in Seven Chances (Buster Keaton Productions, 1925). He also appeared in Keaton's Battling Butler (Buster Keaton Productions, 1926), as Buster's faithful valet, and College (United Artists, 1927), as the dean.

He also supported Marion Davies in The Red Mill (M.G.M, 1927), directed by William Goodrich (a.k.a. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle). After the talkies took over, Edwards made three more films. Most notably was The Public Enemy (Warner Bros., 1931), with James Cagney and directed by William Wellman.

Snitzie: Laurel Humphreys Thurston On her Grandfather

Although born in Hungary (and named Edward Neumann at birth), Snitz was brought to the United States as a small child. His mother was the daughter of a Hungarian rabbi and his father was reportedly a redheaded polish gypsy. His parents had other children born in the United States. Snitz (a diminutive of "Schnitzel", his family nickname) sold brooms on the streets of New York when he was a youngster, and learned to joke and clown for the customers. He did not have a noticeable Hungarian accent but he did have a quick ear for languages and spoke several fluently, including Yiddish, Spanish and German as well as English and Hungarian.

After moving from street performing to Vaudeville, Snitz developed a comedic talent. He traveled extensively with various theatrical companies and met his wife (his junior by more than 20 years) on one such tour. Her name was Eleanor Taylor, an Irish actress originally from Boston and later transplanted to San Francisco. After their marriage, and even after the birth of their first child, Snitz and Eleanor continued to tour. On one trip, the theatrical company was marooned in Panama when the manager ran off with the receipts. The company, including actress Spring Byington, had to make their way across to the Pacific to catch a ship back to California.

Snitz and Eleanor had three daughters. Cricket was the eldest by eight years. My mother, Evelyn, was the middle child and Marian was the baby. All three were put into films. In fact, the entire family made a series of two reel comedies at Universal in the late 1920's, premised upon a theatrical family with three daughters (surprise).

My mother always expressed some comedic exasperation that she had to play a bratty ten year old while her younger but more glamorous sister at age twelve and twenty year old Cricket played contemporary teenagers. We have stills from those films showing the entire family. At this time, Snitz was making $5,000 a week, quite a sum before income taxes.

The family lived on Wilton Place in Hollywood, and the younger children went to The Hollywood School for Girls, close by the present Hollywood Bowl. My mother remembered playing with little Noah Beery, riding her pony on Sunset Boulevard because her mother thought it was a "quiet, safe country road" and sneaking peeks from the stairs at the parties her parents would throw for the Hollywood set.

Snitz was apparently well-beloved by just about everyone. He was an inveterate gambler, a player of the ponies and someone who loved to party. He was also a devoted husband and idolized his beautiful wife and all three daughters. Snitz would smuggle salami and sausage sandwiches home from his late night forays, sneak upstairs and wake my mother and her little sister and have a secret midnight picnic, in defiance of my grandmothers quite advanced ban on "junk food" (no soda pop, no chewing gum, no processed food.)

Snitz became very ill with cirrhosis of the liver and rheumatoid arthritis while filming Public Enemy. He is in the early scenes as "Putty Nose" but then dropped from the rest of the picture when he became too sick to continue.

This was the Great Depression, and the family fell on pretty hard times. The big house, the chauffeured car (Snitz never learned to drive) and the cabin in the Santa Monica Mountains all disappeared. He lived for a number of years as a bedridden invalid, but even when his hands became completely crippled, he could still deal a deck of cards with flair. After he died, my grandmother received a flood of visitors who forced handfuls of money upon her, insisting that "Snitz loaned it to me and I just wanted to pay it back."

Eleanor went back to work as a dress extra, using her own evenings gowns for many of the roles. By this time, Cricket was a young widow with a small child. (Her husband was a flamboyant L.A. City Attorney named Newt Kendall who had represented the owners of gambling ships anchored off the coast before he become a public servant and the ship owners metamorphosized into movie producers.)

Cricket started working as a secretary at The Jaffe Agency in Hollywood, and became first an agent and, by the time of her death in 1971, an associate film producer at Columbia Pictures in New York where she worked on Born Free, The Victors and The Guns of Navarone, among other projects.

Marian went to New York as a young actress, and soon married writer Irwin Shaw ("The Young Lions", "Rich Man, Poor Man", etc.) They lived most of their life in Europe following the HUAC Hearings. Their son is a writer. Marian died in 96 after a late-blooming career as a theatrical producer in France.

My mother, Evelyn, went to work at RKO as a story analyst where she met my father, John Humphreys, and freelanced as short-story writers after World War II and into the 1950's. With a young family, they returned to the studios as analysts and, eventually, story editors. My father wrote episodic TV. in the 1950's and my mother became the executive story editor at MGM, and then in New York for CBS before retirement.

As small children, my brothers and I can remember going to work with our parents and little old men would come up and pinch our cheeks and say "So, you're Snitzie's grandchildren!" Then they would tell us how they still recalled all the times they'd spent with him. He was a tiny man with a huge personality.

Many years after his death, total strangers would seek us out to relive their favorite "Snitz Stories". He would probably be pleased that the family interest in entertainment continues with his grandchildren, and now some of his great grandchildren.