Einar Linden on AllMovie

Swedish-born silent screen actor Einar Linden starred as Don Jose opposite Theda Bara's Carmen (1916) and was so taken by the famous vamp that he composed an ode to her fatal allure: Those Perilous Eyes. A child prodigy who grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark, Linden had studied music and vocals in Paris with De Resche and Sbriglia. By 1905, he was singing Loge in Das Rheingold and Jack Rance in The Girl of the Golden West. At one point Sarah Bernhardt's leading man at the Opera Comique in Paris, Linden made his American debut in 1914 in Le Jardinier, for which he had written the libretto himself. "At first I was not in sympathy with things American," he told a reporter, "but now I could not be persuaded to leave this country." Linden made his screen debut in The Family Stain (1915), old-fashioned detective hokum based on a successful French play, before his great breakthrough role as Bara's Don José. She apparently requested him again for The Eternal Sapho (1916), one of those routine vamp thrillers that Fox ground out like just so much sausage at the time; and he was a dashing Paris to her slightly overripe Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1916). Bara earned good reviews for her effort despite an obvious case of miscasting, but Linden's presence was merely noticed and he disappeared from films after playing Løvborg to stage star Nance O'Neil's Hedda Gabler (1917). When he died in 1954, Linden had long been circulation manager of a local Los Angeles newspaper.