Silent Film Star Monte Blue

I lived in Hollywood through most of the 1980's. While visiting LA for a conference a couple of years ago, I visited my old neighborhood. One of the things I most wanted to see again was my Uncle Monte Blue's (1887-1963) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6286 Hollywood Blvd (Hollywood & Vine), where he was enshrined on February 8, 1960. In 1959, he married Betty Jean Munson, my father's oldest sister. Monte was 72 and Betty was 42. I don’t remember it, but my parents told me I was introduced to him as an infant.

Uncle Monte had an all-American rags-to-riches story. Half French, half Cherokee, his birth name was Gerard Montgomery Bluefeather. Born in Indianapolis, he was placed in an orphanage as a child, yet he persevered, making it through Purdue University and excelling at all sports and physical activities. Blue was discovered by director D.W. Griffith while working as a day laborer on the set of The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith observed him one day, standing on a soapbox giving a heated speech about capital and labor. Later, when another actor playing the part of a stump speaker wasn't sufficiently inspiring, Griffith remembered Blue and gave him a chance. He continued on in supporting roles until his breakthrough role as the hero Danton in Griffith's French Revolution-era epic Orphans of the Storm (1921) opposite the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy. He was the romantic lead in a long string of silent films through the 1920's. He successfully made the transition into "talkies" and continued to work as a character actor for film and television. One of his best remembered roles was as the sheriff in Key Largo, the 1948 film noir film directed by John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, and Lionel Barrymore. He retired from acting in 1954. He suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting Wisconsin on business in 1963 (Filmography IMDB | Cyrano Silent Movies).

1920's era postcard found at Paradise Leased.

Uncle Monte owned a house at 1019 N. Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. The house was sold to George Gershwin, who lived there for a year, during which he composed Rhapsody in Blue. Later the house was sold to the singer Rosemary Clooney, who kept it for 50 years. It was demolished in 2005. Story/photos at Gershwin House.

My Aunt Betty Munson Blue, his widow, came from a family of artists and trained at the Ecole de Beaux Arts Palace (Fontainebleau, France). After Monte’s death, she opened The Monte Blue Art Center in Beverly Hills on Wilshire near Doheny, a block from the old Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences building at 8949 Wilshire, where she taught traditional oil painting until about 1980. I traveled from Michigan to California several times to take lessons at her school as a child (1971 photo in the slideshow above). Betty attracted many Hollywood clients, notably the comedian Red Buttons, and Alan Hale, who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island. She relocated to Seminole, Florida in her later years, where she started the Monte Blue Art Center, teaching painting to disabled people. She died in 1996 (obit in the Tampa Bay Times).

In 2022, a random person emailed me to say “You mention that Monte Blue was Cherokee. There is no documentation of Cherokee membership in his family going back three or four generations. He made it up. His family was of Dutch/German origins and their surname was Blauw, a Dutch name changed to Blue. His real name was not Bluefeather. Check his heritage and family tree by members of his family on Ancestry. No Indian heritage whatsoever.” I have not researched this, and do not know if there is truth to this statement.