William Powell was one of the most popular and longest-enduring leading men in Hollywood, his stardom lasting four decades, from the 1920s through the 1950s, and even beyond his retirement in 1955, and embracing some of the best comedies, detective thrillers, and dramas in each of those decades. William Horatio Powell was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1892, and in his early teens the family moved to Kansas City, MO. His father was an accountant and planned a career in law for him, but the younger Powell got other ideas after he worked on a high-school production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals. A quiet and studious boy, he enjoyed the freedom that acting gave him, and came to seek out more plays and watch professional actors at work, frequenting the city's theaters and even taking a job as an usher at an opera house to learn what he could from watching actors at work. Powell enrolled in the University of Kansas in an attempt to satisfy his father but was gone almost as soon as he arrived, in pursuit of an acting career. He had to support himself, as his father refused to contribute to his support, so he went to work for the telephone company in 1910. By

the following year, he'd conceived of a plan to go to New York: he wrote to a wealthy aunt appealing for her assistance and a loan of 1,400 dollars; he got 700 dollars, put up the rest himself, and was off to New York. There he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Joseph Schildkraut and Edward G. Robinson.
Powell got his first role, a walk-on in The Ne'er-Do-Well, in 1912, and in 1913 got a supporting role in Within the Law, which was successful enough to keep him employed for two years on tour. He also married Eileen Wilson, an actress in the cast of the play, in 1915; their marriage lasted 16 years and gave them one son, William David Powell, born in 1925. Powell moved between stock companies based in Pittsburgh, Portland (OR), Buffalo, and Detroit, and was back on Broadway in 1917 in The King and the Judge of Zalamea. That same year, he was cast in the musical comedy Going Up, which became a huge hit for the time, running 351 performances. He spent a season in Boston with the Castle Square Stock Company and then returned to Broadway for what proved to be his star-making role, as the villain Javier in Spanish Love, which ran from 1920 through 1922. During the run of the show, he was approached backstage and offered a role in a new movie version of Sherlock Holmes, to star John Barrymore, and, intrigued by the idea of working in this burgeoning entertainment medium, accepted. He ended up playing the secondary villain of Fortnam, opposite Barrymore, and was a smashing success.

A whole new career opened up for Powell with the release of Sherlock Holmes. He quickly appeared in two more movies that year, and he was done with the theater after one last, unsuccessful play, The Woman Who Laughed (1923). Over the next seven years, he came to specialize in playing villains onscreen, his intense yet suave, mustachioed presence gracing a series of melodramas and costume romances, including Under the Red Robe (1923) and Romola (1925), the latter shot in Italy, where he became a lifelong friend of the star, Ronald Colman. That movie, in which he brought a romantic and witty side to the heavy, marked the peak of Powell's silent-era villain portrayals, and he was never less than top-billed for the rest of his career. Powell worked in some of the best movies of the late silent era, including early versions

from 1920 through 1922. During the run of the show, he was approached backstage and offered a role in a new movie version of Sherlock Holmes, to star John Barrymore, and, intrigued by the idea of working in this burgeoning entertainment medium, accepted. He ended up playing the secondary villain of Fortnam, opposite Barrymore, and was a smashing success.

A whole new career opened up for Powell with the release of Sherlock Holmes. He quickly appeared in two more movies that year, and he was done with the theater after one last, unsuccessful play, The Woman Who Laughed (1923). Over the next seven years, he came to specialize in playing villains onscreen, his intense yet suave, mustachioed presence gracing a series of melodramas and costume romances, including Under the Red Robe (1923) and Romola (1925), the latter shot in Italy, where he became a lifelong friend of the star, Ronald Colman. That movie, in which he brought a romantic and witty side to the heavy, marked the peak of Powell's silent-era villain portrayals, and he was never less than top-billed for the rest of his career. Powell worked in some of the best movies of the late silent era, including early versions of The Great Gatsby (1926), Beau Geste (also 1926), and The Four Feathers (1928), and was among the top stars at Paramount -- but he had an even bigger future ahead of him with the dawn of the sound era.

The arrival of synchronized sound hit Hollywood like an earthquake, wiping out the careers of an entire generation of stars, but Powell -- as an experienced stage actor -- was more than equal to the challenge at hand. It was during this period that he made the transition from villainous to heroic parts, and his breakthrough came when he was cast as Philo Vance, the detective created by author S.S. Van Dine. The Canary Murder Case (1929), starring Powell and Louise Brooks, was started as a silent but converted to a talkie after shooting was completed; Brooks refused to return to dub her voice and ended her Hollywood career as a result, but Powell proved even more charismatic with his voice than he had seemed in the silents. He sounded the way he looked, sophisticated, with excellent but natural diction, and was very appealing in the part of the detective, essentially carrying the movie when another actress was forced to voice Brook's part.

Powell was cast in a multitude of roles over the next few years at Paramount, and was successful in all of them, becoming one of the studio's most reliable leading men and a serious box-office draw. In 1931, Powell and his first wife, Eileen, divorced, and that same year he married Carole Lombard, then an up-and-coming young leading lady with whom he appeared in Man of the World and Ladies' Man (both 1931); they were divorced two years later but always remained on friendly terms. When he moved over to Warner Bros. briefly during the early '30s, Powell took on an even greater diversity of parts, however, including one part that even decades later seems a total surprise, the role of a Lower East Side attorney and first-generation American who challenges the prejudices and exclusivity of New York's upscale legal profession, in Lawyer Man (1933) -- and he pulled it off. But Powell's best role at Warner Bros. was in The Kennel Murder Case that same year, in which he returned to the part of Philo Vance in one of the finest mystery films of its period. In 1934, Powell moved over to MGM -- then the Tiffany's of Hollywood studios and ascending to the peak of its artistic and commercial