French Serial Stars

André Deed as Boireau

Le costume blanc
D: André Deed. P: Societé Anonyme des Phonographes et Cinématographes Lux. Fr 1908

321-André Deed
André Deed

“According to Sadoul, Deed had been an singer and acrobat on the café-concert circuit, performing at the Folies-Bergère and the Châtelet, and had occasionally even appeared in Méliès‘ films. His Boireau character comes out of that stage tradition, both as grotesquely bewildered clown and a skillful practioneer of physical gags. (…) By repeatedly stitching together adjacent spaces into short, unified scenes, the Boireau series (…) seems to have established an economical narrative model that could continually prepare for, extend, and conclude its comic business and run at least as long, if not longer than, Pathé’s other comic films.”
Richard Abel: The Ciné Goes to Town. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1994, p. 228 f.

“In 1908, Itala’a artistic director Giovanni Pastrone hired away star André Deed from Pathé, where he had become famous with the character of Boireau, and renamed him Cretinetti, after a popular cartoon. Deed found new popularity in France, this time as Gribouille, and became famous in most English- and Spanish-speaking countries as, respectively, Foolshead and Toribio or Don Toribio. At Itala, the minute Deed starred in more than 90 films, some of which he directed, mainly impersonating two apparently respectable, yet restless and highly destruvtive characters: the good family boy donning a sailor suit, and the distinguished bourgeois, sporting light color outfits. No matter what sub-role Deed was playing, his surrealist display of anarchic energy remained similar.”
Giorgio Bertellini: Silent Italian Cinema: A New Medium for Old Geographies. In: Frank Burke (ed.): A Companion to Italian Cinema. John Wiley & Sons 2017, p. 38

Roméo Bosetti as director and actor

Roméo se fait bandit
R: Romeo Bosetti. D: Max Linder. P: Pathé. Fr 1909