Cat. #00197421: SIDNEY OLCOTT

Extremely rare vintage 11x14-inch sepia-tone portrait, actually an 8x10 image within very wide white borders, warmly signed and inscribed in black fountain pen to silent actor Gino Corrado and his wife or daughter, misspelling the former's name:  "The most happy remembrance of Genio and charming Bernice-- sincerely-- Sidney Olcott".  In good condition, save for a 1.5-inch tear to the upper right-hand border which could mostly be trimmed away, if one wished to pare the piece down to 8x10 inches.  After working briefly as an actor at Mutoscope, Sidney Olcott became a prolific, pioneering director of silent films Kalem and Famous Players Lasky, often of magnificent scope and grandeur.  He was widely considered the greatest director of the early silent era, and was a major impact on the later work of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille, but, by the late 1920s, his techniques were considered "old hat".  Olcott's enormous body of work, which included collaborations with top-notch stars like Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, and Rudolph Valentino, included Ben Hur (1907), the long-lost horror films Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908) and The Vampire (1913), Jesus of Nazareth (1912), Madame Butterfly (1915), Little Old New York (1923), and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924).