At six foot-two and hitting the scale at 190 pounds, dark-haired Roy Stewart was perhaps the largest of the silent screen cowboy stars. Having toured with the famous Floradora Girls, Stewart entered films in the very early 1910s, playing mainly supporting roles until signing with Triangle in 1916. The studio hoped he might become a new William S. Hart and if that didn't quite happen, Stewart certainly starred in his fair share of rough-and-tumble Westerns, often portraying a character named Red Saunders. Like Art Acord, Stewart would be one of the first stars of what later would be considered series B-Westerns, cranking out a seemingly endless stream of two-reelers under umbrella titles such as Timber Tales and Tales of the Old West. In between the sagebrush heroics, Stewart would occasionally play a supporting role in a non-Western -- Mary Pickford's Sparrows (1927) being perhaps the most prominent -- but he remained an action performer to the end. He weathered the transition to sound quite well, as the commandant in the first all-talkie big-budget Western, In Old Arizona (1929), and was settling into a new career as a character actor when he died of a heart attack in his Westwood, CA, home.
by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
