This site was created to showcase and share the Silent Era Hollywood portraits taken by Melbourne Spurr.

Melbourne Spurr arrived in Hollywood around 1917 and worked for the noted photographer Fred Hartsook taking portraits of the early stars. Spurr photographed Mary Pickford while working at the Hartsook studio and so impressed her that she personally helped launch his career as a Hollywood portrait photographer. By the mid 1920s he was one of the premier celebrity portraitists in the world.

By this time, though, the major movie studios were mandating that their stars could only be photographed by their own photographers. Spurr chose to keep his own studio, and was eventually shut out in favor of men like George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Eugene Robert Richee and others who worked for the big motion picture studios.

Spurr shined in Hollywood for one glorious decade - the "Roaring 20s" - but then moved on to photographing other notables like US presidents, artists, authors and dancers.

Although most of the actors and actresses Spurr photographed are "forgotten" now, they were very famous in their time. Collecting portraits of favorite stars was a popular passtime in the early years of Hollywood, so these pictures could be found in the homes of fans around the world.

You can view over 1,000 of his portraits of the silent stars by signing in and then clicking "Photos" on the left side of the screen. This requires a Yahoo ID. To view a smaller collection of Spurr portraits without signing in, you can also visit the site listed at the bottom of this screen.

PLEASE NOTE, MANY OF THE RARE IMAGES ON THE SITE WERE SCANNED OR PHOTOCOPIED FROM PORTRAITS FOUND IN OLD MAGAZINES, SO THERE IS A GRAININESS NOT FOUND IN THE ORIGINALS, WHICH ARE SIGNIFICANTLY CLEARER AND SHARPER. I have also included a few hundred scans of ORIGINAL glass negatives that remain in one collection.

Enjoy!