page_title: Gordon Griffith
section_title: Silent film
hierarchical_section_title: Gordon Griffith / Silent film
caption_attribution_description: English: Lewis Sargent as Tom Sawyer and Gordon Griffith as Huckleberry Finn in Huckleberry Finn - publicity still (original image cropped&#160;: see source)
context_page_description: Gordon S. Griffith was an American assistant director, film producer, and one of the first child actors in the American movie industry. Griffith worked in the film industry for five decades, acting in over 60 films, and surviving the transition from silent films to talkies—films with sound. During his acting career, he worked with Charlie Chaplin, and was the first actor to portray Tarzan on film.
context_section_description: Griffith was born on July 4, 1907 in Chicago, Illinois, to actors Harry Sutherland Griffith  and Katherine Kiernan Griffith. He had two siblings, an older sister Gertrude, and a younger brother Graham—also an actor. Griffith was already an experienced actor when, at age seven, he got his first acting role as a regular character in the Little Billy series of films. Mack Sennett of Keystone Studios cast Griffith in many of his slapstick features, where he eventually earned supporting roles in Charlie Chaplin films, including Tillie's Punctured Romance, in which he portrayed a paperboy, a role that Milton Berle frequently claimed to have played.
  His big break came with the role of young Tarzan, in the 1918 film Tarzan of the Apes. He was required to do his own stunts, such as climbing trees, swinging from vines, and interacting closely with a chimpanzee. Griffith also has several nude scenes in the first half of the film. Griffith appears before the actor portraying the adult Tarzan—Elmo Lincoln—making him the first actor to portray Tarzan in film. After seeing the movie, a critic described Griffith as "a youthful actor of uncommon gifts."
  Griffith received the role of Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn. Later he was again cast in the first Tarzan serial as Tarzan's son, Korak, a role that has been described as "anticipating John Sheffield's 'Boy' roles [in later Tarzan films]." He continued to act in silent films well into his teen years, including a role as Mary Pickford's older brother in Little Annie Rooney (1925).
  Both of Griffth's parents died in the 1920s—his mother in 1921 and his father in 1926. At the time of the 1930 census, he and his brother were living with his sister and her family in Pasadena, California.
caption: As Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn (1920), with Lewis Sargent as Huck
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