Gibson Gowland
2 credits on HibingeTV
English-born American film actor, born in 1877. He worked as a seaman and a ranch hand before drifting into acting in silent Hollywood. He is best known for playing Dr. McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), a performance driven by physical presence rather than theatrical training. He spent his later years in character roles and died in obscurity in 1951.
Acted In
Drama, Silent
Erich von Stroheim's directorial debut, in which he also stars as a predatory Austrian lieutenant who sets his sights on an American doctor's wife during a holiday in the Alps. Made for Carl Laemmle's Universal on a small budget, the film already bears von Stroheim's signatures: the meticulous detail, the moral rot beneath polite society, the contempt for men too absorbed in their work to notice their wives. Sam De Grasse and Francelia Billington play the couple, with Gibson Gowland as the mountain guide. The film is in the public domain in the United States.
Drama · Silent
Blind Husbands
1919 - as Silent Sepp, the mountain guide
Drama, Silent
Erich von Stroheim's adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague follows a gentle San Francisco dentist who marries the woman his best friend courted, and watches their life curdle over a lottery jackpot she hoards while he drinks. Von Stroheim shot a film that reportedly ran over nine hours; MGM cut it to roughly two, and the excised footage is believed lost. What survives is still one of the most celebrated silent films ever made, famous for its naturalistic location shooting in San Francisco and Death Valley and for ZaSu Pitts's harrowing portrait of avarice. The final crawl across the baking desert, with the two survivors handcuffed to a corpse, is one of the great endings in cinema. The film was a financial failure on release and is now regarded as a high-water mark of American silent drama. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.
Drama · Silent
Greed
1924 - as Dr. John McTeague