Cecil B. DeMille ’98: From PMC Cadet to Hollywood Pioneer
Cecil Blount DeMille was born August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Cecil's father and mother were schoolteachers and staunch Episcopalians. Each night, his fundamentalist father, Henry, read passages from the Old and New Testaments to his family. The true passion in Henry DeMille's life though, was theater and he had moderate success as a writer and producer of plays. After her husband's death, Mathilda Beatrice DeMille opened the Henry C. DeMille School, a girls boarding school, at the family home in Pompton, New Jersey. Cecil was enrolled at Pennsylvania Military College in 1896 for free in exchange for the education his mother provided the daughter of Colonel Charles Hyatt. Cecil made the trip from New Jersey to Chester on bicycle, with his mother, to save money. In the two years he spent at PMC, DeMille won medals in marksmanship and attained a grade point average of 94 out of 100. Eugene S. Hoopes, a fellow cadet at the time, remembered DeMille in his memoir, Wearing the Gray, as ""an odd character, a bit of a dreamer and very restless. He was not the type who could adjust himself to the requirements of military life."" According to his biographer Charles Higham, Pennsylvania Military College was a good fit for Cecil because Charles Hyatt was as staunch a Christian as his father had been. Higham writes in Cecil B. DeMille: A Biography of the Most Successful Film Maker of Them All that Cecil was a ""determined, forceful, neat boy,"" an ""ideal all-rounder, an athlete with brains."" DeMille ""loved the endless dawn drills, the cold baths, the stern reminders of the dangers of falling from a high level of manly virtues."" However, he was ""fired with an inherited passion for the theater,"" and in 1898, with Colonel Hyatt's approval and blessing, he left PMC. Cecil B. DeMille went on to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and graduated in 1900. After graduation DeMille began touring with an acting troupe. DeMille met his future wife, Constance Adams, during the tour. The young couple married soon after they met over the objections of Constance's father who was a Judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Although, the early years of their marriage were characterized by extreme poverty, hardship, and struggle, they welcomed the birth of their only child, Cecilia on October 5, 1908. In 1912, Cecil and his friends decided to venture into the new industry of filmmaking. They formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, with Lasky as president, Samuel Goldfish as business manager, and DeMille as general stage director. The group obtained the rights to as many plays as they could, and began to set up studios in Hollywood while filming their first movie. The Squaw Man was sold to States Rights' Market for $43,000 and was well received by the public. Having succeeded in their first attempt in the movie industry, the company quickly expanded, building more elaborate studios and making more films. The 1923 filming of The Ten Commandments is part of Hollywood legend because DeMille set up camp with 2,500 actors, 1,500 technicians, and very elaborate staging that took months to build in a remote California desert. After filming, a great deal of the set was buried beneath the sand dunes. The Ten Commandments was such a success that it was remade in the 1950s starring Charlton Heston. DeMille steadily rose in fame and power. The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company became a unit of Paramount Studios. Among the 70 features that he directed, DeMille turned out such epic films as The Crusades, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, and The King of Kings (his personal favorite). Many of his films were morality tales, based on his father's reading and writings. A believer in the literal word of the Bible, DeMille saw himself as a missionary, making scriptures attractive in a time of materialism and heathenism. Despite being labeled as shrewd, arrogant, and vulgar by critics, and egotistical in public opinion, DeMille remained an extremely demanding director who never swerved from his concept of what a film should be. In general, Cecil B. DeMille's movies are known for their fantastic costumes and elaborate sets, as well as a diverse subject matter that includes social comedies, dramas, melodramas, historical epics, and Biblical spectaculars. Cecil B. DeMille died on January 21, 1959, of a heart attack at age 77. He is remembered as one of the most influential directors in all of filmmaking. Although DeMille did not graduate from Pennsylvania Military College, he never forgot his former school. He received an honorary degree in 1931 from PMC and established a scholarship at the college. He created the Freedom Trophy (now called the Cecil B. DeMille Trophy) in 1951 to be given to a student ""having shown in an outstanding manner his personal conviction and devotion to the American ideal of individual freedom and the inalienable rights of man."" In a February 1956 letter to RCA Vice President Mannie Sachs, who was to be the commencement speaker at PMC that year, DeMille wrote that ""the formative years of youth are most important and it is good for America that PMC is still giving, and I hope will continue to give, the sound, high-principled education it was giving that September day in 1896 when I rode my bicycle all the way to Chester.""
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