Charles Meredith (August 27, 1894 – November 28, 1964)[1] was an American stage, film, and television actor, who also directed plays and taught in college drama departments.

[fn 2][2][17] After college, Meredith joined the road company for the Washington Square Players (WSP), performing its repertory of one-act plays alongside Sam Jaffe and Ralph Roeder.

[18][19] He then had a major role in a two-act play, Plots and Playwrights, staged by the WSP at the Comedy Theatre, which also featured Katharine Cornell and Helen Westley.

[20] Meredith returned to Pittsburgh for a play in October 1917,[21] but went back to New York in early 1918 for a series of short-lived Broadway productions.

First up was the debut of "an odd new comedy" called April by Hubert Osborne,[22] followed by Her Honor, the Mayor,[23] and in June 1918, The Best Sellers, which amused Heywood Broun in his review.

The Los Angeles Times said the four principals, Florence Vidor, Meredith, ZaSu Pitts, and David Butler, would play characters representing "the Classes" and "the Masses".

[30] In between filmings, Meredith decided to join another stage company, taking part in one-act plays with Neely Dickson's Hollywood Community Theater.

[38] While discussing his performances with the Hollywood Community Theatre in early October, a newspaper mentioned Meredith was "now playing leads at the Lasky studio".

His third Lasky film was Judy of Rogue's Harbor, for which he supported Mary Miles Minter in a pot-boiler involving kidnapped children, a stolen fortune and bomb-throwing anarchists.

[42] The Ladder of Lies starred Ethel Clayton as Edith Parrish, a magazine illustrator whose publisher friend marries an "unworthy" wife.

While heroine Dorothy Dalton is supposed to be a professional dancer being exploited by her mother, Meredith's leading man is athletic and gallant, but he's also an engineer with little money.

[44] The heroine rejects the temptations of ill-gotten gains from her roguish mother and settles for taking a chance on life with her young man.

[47] Directed by William Desmond Taylor for Lasky, the New York Tribune reviewer said: "Miss Clayton, as Avis, did good work, as did, also, Charles Meredith, as the husband.

[48] Though he worked for Vidor and Lasky in his first films, Meredith wasn't bound to an exclusive contract like later leading players under the studio system.

[51] It was also his first movie in which the focus was on the male character: his downfall from a wealthy upbringing to being a derelict, his reformation through suffering, and his rise back through self-reliance and hard work.

[53] Meredith's duke was also a "simple soul", an amateur biologist who naively gives the little shopgirl money to buy books, they being her refuge from drudgery.

[54] Another fairy tale of a story was The Perfect Woman, which starred Constance Talmadge and was produced by Joseph M. Schenck for First National Film Distributors.

Meredith's final Broadway performance came in March 1925, when he played Doris Keane's lover in Starlight, "a comedy in ten scenes and an epilogue".

[70] He held the position until August 1929, when he resigned in a dispute over whether the Community Arts group should open a drama school and mount amateur productions.

[73] Meredith resigned the Dallas positions in July 1938 to take up managing and directing at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina.

[3] Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times, who first covered Meredith in 1919, called him "one of the kingpin leading men of the silent screen" and made much of his return to films after twenty years.

[83] Meredith continued performing in films right up to the last year of his life, when four movies he had made were released: The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Seven Days in May, Dead Ringer, and The Quick Gun.

[6] The registrar also recorded "Claims both ankles broken playing football", along with supporting a wife, as mitigating factors for Meredith being drafted.