Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1931)

4P "From the Manger to the Cross," made by the old Kalem Company in 1912, won world-wide fame for R. Henderson Bland, a young English actor, for his portrayal of Christ. It was made in Palestine and was directed by Sidney Olcott :*♦ 5 A recent portrait of Capt. Henderson Bland. The deeds of a warrior he performed in the British army from 1914 to 1918 are a far cry from his sympathetic portrayal of the gentle Man of Galilee just a few years before Back After 17 Years BROADCASTING over the radio now, and soon to be on his way to Hollywood, is a remarkable personality who has played many roles in life, roles as far apart and as contrasting in dramatic lights and shadows as are day and night. Poet, actor, playwright, journalist, art critic, champion swordsman, soldier, radio speaker, director of the Poets' Club of London, representative of the Ypres League in America, he has crowded into his two score years the activities and energies of ten average men. He has made arrangements to appear in one picture and if he likes the work, and, he adds, if the work likes him, he may continue on as a picture actor. HE is a picture pioneer. Away back in 1912 he played the role of Christ in Sidney Olcott's (then epic) production of " From the Manger to the Cross." Of his work in that picture, which was shown all over the civilized world and is still being shown, the famous Dean of St. Paul's Church of London, the Rev. William Inge, said: "Nothing, not even the Passion Play of Oberammergau, brought home to my mind the realities of the life and work of Jesus as did Mr. Henderson Bland's picture." So it must have been good, for Dean Inge is not usually so enthusiastic. Yet two years later the man who enacted the role of the Christus with such feeling that it evoked this high praise from a famous churchman, went into the bloody work of the most terrible massacres the world has ever known, with all that was 76 in him. He wrote a poem on the Sea of Galilee which is a thing of great spiritual and reverential beauty. And a few years later, on the battlefield of Festubert, he wrote one of the finest poems inspired by the war, one that has made that field of carnage and death a hallowed spot. He was a captain in a famous regiment that has to its credit more battle flags than any regiment which engaged in the World War. It was part of the Fifth British Army that was so thoroughly decimated in the fierce fighting of the first two years when the British were throwing every ounce of their strength into the struggle to keep the Germans from capturing the railheads and Channel ports. Of his own original company of two hundred men, twelve men survived. HE received his early dramatic training as a youthful member of Sir Herbert Tree's company, and it was while he was playing there that Sidney Olcott, the director, chose him as the man he wanted to play the central role of his picture of the life of Christ. Strangely enough, it was while he was making this film that he had his first taste of fighting. The distrustful natives waylaid the picture company and they had to fight their way to safety. Henderson Bland is six feet, one, and has much of the quiet British personality that made Percy Marmont such a favorite until, financially secure in life, Mr. Marmont decided to retire to the life of an English gentleman on his modest estate in Surrey.