Description:
Coming from a show business family (his parents were stage actors), Rowland V. Lee began his career as a child actor in stock and on Broadway. He interrupted his stage career for a stint as a Wall Street stockbroker, but gave that up after two years and returned to the stage. Lee was hired by Thomas H. Ince as an actor in 1915, and after service in World War I returned to Ince, but this time as a director. Lee didn't specialize in any particular genre in the many films he directed, but several of his lower-budget horror films were especially effective in their grim, gritty atmosphere, and his last film, Captain Kidd (1945) with Charles Laughton, had the potential to be a first-rate adventure yarn, but was hampered by its low budget.
Birthday
September 6, 1891
Born In
Findlay, Ohio, USA
Alternative names
Roland V. Lee
, Roland Lee
, Rowland Lee
Spouse/Ex-
Eleanor Worthington November 6, 1924 - December 21, 1975 (his death)
Trivia
He had his own 214-acre movie ranch, located in the San Fernando Valley
in California. He purchased the property in 1935 and called it Farm
Lake Ranch, but the film industry always knew it as the Rowland V. Lee
Ranch, with its pale brown hills of barley chaff and olive and
eucalyptus trees and two scenic lakes, but for some reason it wasn't
used much for westerns. For I've Always Loved You (1946), Republic Pictures built an
extensive farmhouse and barn set. It also constructed a stone and wood
bridge over one of the lakes, which would usually be photographed as a
river. The farmhouse set would be adapted and modified over the years.
RKO used it as a period French farmhouse for its modest swashbuckler
At Sword's Point (1952). Its most famous use was as an Indiana Quaker family farm
during the Civil War in Allied Artists' Friendly Persuasion (1956). To give it that
"Indiana look", director William Wyler had cornfields planted, sycamore trees
brought in and huge areas covered with green grass. The wooden
farmhouse was also given a fake stone facade. You'll also see the ranch
used to great effect in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955).
After Lee died in 1975, the ranch was developed into an expensive gated
community called Hidden Lake Estates.
