ROMANCE OF THE STAGE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 97, 26 April 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

ROMANCE OF THE STAGE

STARTED AS CALL-BOY. NOW EARNING £26,000 A YEAR. An Englishman who began his, career as a call-boy in a Birmingham Theatre in 1913 at a salary of 5s a week, returned to England recently from the United States to earn about £5OO a week as D’Artagnan in the production of “The Three Alusketeers” at Drury Lane Theatre. He is Mr Dennis King, who at the age of 32 took Broadway by stQrm and has returned to England for the first time in ten years with the reputation of being the highest-paid young actor in the United States. Result of “Sheer Cheek.” Air King’s career is a romance which, as he explains himself, has been the result of ‘ ‘ sheer cheek. ’ ’ “From a call-boy I got my first part with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre,” he said to a reporter, “by asking for it. “When I went to America ten years ago with Air Gilbert Miller’s company, which was playing Monsieur Beaucaire,’ I discovered that I had a singing voice. So I let everybody know it, and from that day my reputation in America was made.” But Air King has now become very modest. “Please don’t say too much about me,” he said. “I don’t know what the English people will think of me. I have been playing so long in America and 1 know the American public so well now.” When Mr King went to the United States nobody knew him. The greatest thing he had done was to play a minor part in ‘‘Monsieur Beaucaire” at the Palace Theatre in London. In America he quickly became* famous. He plgyed in Shakespeare, A. A. Milne and Bernard Shaw parts, and then he took leading parts in two long runs—“ The Vagabond King” and “The Three Musketeers.”