by Hal Erickson
biography
Born in Armenia, Arthur Edmund Carewe enjoyed a brief Broadway career before his 1919 film bow in The World and Its Woman. Carewe spent much of his film career in adaptations of venerable stage and literary melodramas, usually as a caped mystery figure: the Duke D'Alba in The Ghost Breaker (1922), Svengali in Trilby (1923), the Persian in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and one of the red-herring suspects in The Cat and Canary (1927). In talkies, Carewe revelled in neurotic, wild-eyed characters, notably the tormented junkie Sparrow in The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Arthur Edmund Carewe committed suicide at the reported age of 43.
