Jack Perrin
(07/25/1896 - 12/17/1967)
Jack Perrin was born in Three Rivers, MI, on July 25, 1896. His father, a real estate investor, had an eye on the burgeoning prospects in Los Angeles and moved his family there when Perrin was about four. Jack literally grew up witnessing the birth of the film industry, which exploded there in 1913, after Universal and Famous Players (later known as Paramount) moved out in an attempt to escape Thomas Edison's patent war. Perrin entered films in 1915, reportedly with Mack Sennett (these details are in dispute), before enlisting in the Navy in World War I. Discharged in 1919, he returned to Hollywood and landed a contract with Universal, which lasted until 1921. He was cut loose from what was then the largest studio in the world and made the rapid descent into the world of low-
By the latter part of the 1920s Perrin's fortunes rose to the point where he returned to Universal for a series of Canadian Mountie adventure pictures (on a personal level, he met and married Universal star Josephine Hill in 1920 and the marriage would last until 1937). Although he seemed to possess all the assets necessary for cowboy stardom, fate would not be particularly kind to Jack Perrin. At the beginning of the "talkie" period he left Universal and went back to working for the likes of Webb and Horner again. Things got so bad that in the mid-