Top 10 Welsh actors: Gareth Hughes

Gareth Hughes (1894-1965)

Llanelli-born Gareth Hughes was the most successful Welsh actor in Hollywood in the silent era, but he is sadly all but forgotten in his native country - despite playing juvenile and adult leads in an impressive number of fairly low budget features.

His career parameters are oddly similar to Ivor Novello's (his first film was released in 1919, his last in 1932) Novello made his debut in 1919, retiring in 1934. Hughes indeed made around 40 films and at his peak earned 2,000 dollars a week but his star waned even before the arrival of sound.

Hughes, diminutive at 5ft 5 inches, looked set for great things after effusive reviews of his performance in John S. Robertson's Sentimental Tommy (1921), a film now lost, derived from JM Barrie stories.

In bigger budget studio films later he tended to drop down the cast list as in The Christian (1923) and The Spanish Dancer (1923). Yet he had eyecatching lead roles in an extraordinary variety of material, often films with wildly sentimental or violent subjects.

The Enemies of Women (1923) was an 11-reeler, directed by Alan Crosland - best known for Jolson's The Jazz Singer(1927) - and Hughes played a sybaritic musician in a misogynistic circle who joins up in World War One to escape their influence and is blinded.

Boyish subservience seemed Hughes stock in trade in some films; in Don't Write Letters (1922) he lies in his letters from the World War One trenches and exaggerates his physical prowess to his girlfriend. He's so embarrassed when his marriage proposal is accepted that he masquerades as the letter-writer's brother.

Cast as brother of the film's star Clara Kimball Young in Eyes of Youth, his first significant film (1919), Hughes only moves from the shadow of her skirts when galvanised into shooting an opera entrepreneur who has dishonoured the family name.

Hughes' roles were often highly melodramatic and improbable. In And the Children Pay (1918) his college boy Billy makes his girlfriend pregnant, then refuses to marry her. The child is born blind and crippled. Later Billy's ordered to pay child support but the offspring dies in court - then Billy is denounced from the pulpit and expires in his mothers arms.

In Woman Under Oath (1919) Hughes played a shipping clerk accused of murder and an intertitle at the film's opening asks if women are temperamentally suited to be jurors and then the movie proceeds to develop a plot in which the first female juror in New York admits that she's the killer in the case she's judging.

In The Garments of Truth (made for George D Baker, the most regular Hughes director during the actor's contract with Metro) he's an inveterate liar turned into a George Washington of the truth by medical treatment. Two thirds of Hughes' output is still missing, believed lost ,and the casualty rate prevents easy assessment of his merits.

It's sad that no trace has yet been found of Sentimental Tommy, with Hughes as a lovelorn literary fellow who fancies a former childhood friend (May McAvoy) who rebuffs him only to pine prodigiously later in the film. The two chums are reconciled for the final fade out.

Hughes in later life was prone to the theatrical. In a move almost as melodramatic as any in his film career, he climaxed a spell as minister in the pulpit, by becoming a missionary to the Paiute Indians in Nevada.