Douglas Fairbanks Jr., known forever to Hollywood as "Young Doug," who never reached the zenith of worldwide fame enjoyed by his silent-era icon father, yet made his imprint on some 100 motion pictures, became a real-life war hero and found success as an actor, producer, author, artist and businessman, has died. He was 90.
Fairbanks, debonair denizen of drawing rooms who was born to Hollywood royalty and became a favorite of Britain's royal family, died Sunday in a New York City hospital. After shuttling between Hollywood and London for much of his life, Fairbanks had spent his recent years at homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla.
When Fairbanks published the second of his three autobiographies, "The Salad Days" in 1988, Times film critic Kenneth Turan chided the actor for "dropping a name, and another, and another, and another, and another. . . ." But Turan added that Fairbanks came by the trait honestly and dropped the names with an "appealing" style.
Aside from his own famous relatives, father Douglas Sr. and step-mother Mary Pickford, Fairbanks Jr. really did know Charlie Chaplin, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Maurice Chevalier and Bing Crosby and helped boost the film careers of an Aussie named Errol Flynn and a USC football player named Marion Morrison (John Wayne).
And he did play tennis with King Gustav V of Sweden, study Spanish with John F. Kennedy, meet Queen Elizabeth II when she was a toddler and entertain the grown-up queen, Prince Philip and the rest of her family at his London home.
Her father, King George VI, gave him an honorary knighthood in 1949 for "furthering Anglo-American amity," partly for his work as a U.S. Navy officer for the commando corps of British Adm. Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle to Prince Philip, and partly for his postwar work raising money for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) which sent more than $150 million worth of food and other goods to war-torn European countries.
Fairbanks' war exploits earned him a chestful of medals, including the American Silver Star, the British Distinguished Service Cross and the French Legion of Honor.
A spokesman at Buckingham Palace on Sunday said the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh "will both be sorry to learn of his death."
But on this side of the Atlantic, few intimates of Fairbanks' Hollywood royal family were still alive to mourn. "Young Doug" was among the last of the cinema heroes who were known for their good manners, exquisite grooming, implicit fairness and gentlemanly derring-do.
"I never tried to emulate my father," Douglas Elton Fairbanks Jr. once said. "Anyone trying to do that would be a second-rate carbon copy."
Yet the comparison would always be made. "Young Doug" was the first to note that the famous name opened untold doors for him, and though he never became close to the bigger-than-life parent until Doug Sr.'s last years, the son became an unabashed fan of the father.
Both were movie-star handsome and were, well, movie stars. Adept on stage with commanding voices, both crossed easily from silent films to talkies, albeit near the end of Doug Sr.'s career and the beginning of Doug Jr.'s.
Both buckled swash on screen, the father indelibly in 1920s versions of "The Mark of Zorro," "The Three Musketeers," "Robin Hood," "The Thief of Bagdad," "The Black Pirate" and "The Iron Mask"; the son in 1930s and 1940s releases such as "The Prisoner of Zenda," "Gunga Din," "Sinbad the Sailor" and "The Corsican Brothers."
Both father and son loved and married widely, including stars as big or bigger than they; Doug Sr. married the legendary Mary "America's Sweetheart" Pickford, and Doug Jr. at age 19 wed Joan Crawford.
Ironically, younger filmgoers often fused father and son into one very long-lived hero. The truly knowledgeable never did.
One filmographer remembered Douglas Sr., who died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1939 at 56, as "the silent screen's most beloved hero [whose] cheerful exuberance, moral courage, devil-may-care attitude and physical agility made him a prototype of the idealized image of the American male."
The same historian dismissed Douglas Jr. with, "despite his dashing good looks and agreeable screen personality, he never became a superstar of the magnitude of his father."
"Young Doug," born Dec. 9, 1909, in New York City, was the only son of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and his first wife, cotton heiress Anna Beth Sully Fairbanks. The couple divorced when the son was 9 and he lived with his mother, whose family soon lost its fortune. Schooled at military academies and with private tutors in New York, Pasadena, London and Paris, Fairbanks permitted Hollywood to exploit his famous name and put him in his first movie when he was 13. He said his mother and he urgently needed the money.
