AllMovie

A distinguished stage actor/director who had appeared opposite the likes of Madame Modjeska, Henrietta Crossman, and Wilton Lackaye, Louis Dean enjoyed his greatest success starring on Broadway in Sherlock Holmes and The Bells. Onscreen from the mid-1910s, Dean specialized in playing the German emperor Wilhelm II, appearing as the Kaiser in the controversial My Four Years in Germany, The Birth of a Race, and, appropriately enough, The Kaiser's Finish, all released in 1918. In 1920, Dean became perhaps the most prominent actor to appear in Oscar Micheaux's silent "race films" (African-American-oriented fare), when he acted the villainous August Barr in Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), one of only three silent Micheaux films still extant. He died of a heart attack while vacationing in Hawaii.