Frank Bacon

Frank Bacon grew up in San Jose and at age fourteen went to work on a sheep ranch, where he remained for three years, until he became an apprentice to a San Jose photographer.  Eventually he established his own photography studio.  After four years taking portraits he moved on to newspaper work with the San Jose Mercury News and a few years later he bought The Napa Reporter and later established The Mountain View Register.  He tried a couple of times to run for public office, but was never elected.   

Dissatisfied with newspapers and politics, he returned to San Jose and joined a stock theatre company, or in his own words: “turned respectable and became an actor.”   What came next for Frank Bacon was years of drudgery in stock, repertoire and vaudeville, and seventeen years at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, where played more than 700 parts during his time there.   Frank Bacon’s theory of acting was explained by him in an address to the American Academy of Dramatic in 1921: “If you were to ask me what I know about acting.  I would say I don’t know anything.  My advice to young actors would be to learn all about acting and then forget it.  I believe absolutely in naturalness—believe in yourself.”  He moved on to New York after the 1906 earthquake terminated his career in San Francisco .

Fourteen years later, when Frank Bacon was 54,  Lightnin’ a play he had been writing for forty years was finally produced.  The production, staring himself,  broke all records and eclipsed all past Broadway successes.  “Lightnin’ ultimately ran in New York for three years and a day— a total of 1,291 consecutive performances. George M. Cohen called Frank Bacon America’s greatest character actor.  When Lightin’ closed its Broadway run  to go on the road,  President Harding congratulated him; the New York mayor and United States Secretary of Labor headed a parade accompanied by the Police Band; and hundreds of actors escorted Frank Bacon to the Pennsylvania Train Station where he was presented the world’s champion belt of the playwriting and producing world.

After his death at 58 in 1922, Frank Bacon’s manager said of him: “A kindly man, of simple tastes, who gave much to the public that he served and asked little in return, Bacon was known to his friends in the profession as much for the big, human man he was as for his sterling qualities as an actor.  He really died on the Saturday night when he gave his las performance— and his greatest.”