page_title: Thomas Meighan
section_title: Stardom
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Meighan / Film career / Stardom
caption_attribution_description: English: Silent movie actors Thomas Meighan and Pauline Starke as they appeared in the newspaper The Morning Tulsa Daily World in an advertisement for the American comedy film If You Believe It, It's So (1922).
context_page_description: Thomas Meighan was an American actor of silent films and early talkies. He played several leading-man roles opposite popular actresses of the day, including Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. At one point he commanded $10,000 a week.
context_section_description: Meighan hit stardom in 1919. One of his best-known films of the period was that year's The Miracle Man which featured Lon Chaney Sr.; it is now believed to be lost except for brief clips. This was followed with Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female which starred him opposite Gloria Swanson and Lila Lee. Most of that film's cast returned for the 1920 film Why Change Your Wife? which also co-starred Bebe Daniels. In April 1925, Meighan and Swanson produced a short film directed by Allan Dwan for the annual "Spring Gambol" for The Lambs. This film (sometimes known as Gloria Swanson Dialogue), made in Lee DeForest's sound-on-film Phonofilm process, was made as a joke for the live event, showing Swanson trying to crash the all-male club.
  His popularity continued through the Roaring Twenties, during which he starred in several pictures. In 1924 he played in The Alaskan opposite Estelle Taylor and Anna May Wong. In 1927, Meighan starred in The City Gone Wild opposite Louise Brooks.
  His final silents, both produced by Howard Hughes in 1928, were The Mating Call, which was critical of the Ku Klux Klan, and The Racket, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Both were thought lost until rediscovered in private collections in 2006; they were restored by University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and shown on Turner Classic Movies.
caption: Meighan with co-star Pauline Starke in 1922, as they appeared in publicity for the film If You Believe It, It's So
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1081", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "925"}