Travers Vale: Biography and Background

Travers Edmund Vale (31 January 1865 − 10 January 1927; born Solomon Flohm), was an English-born silent film director, theatre impresario, playwright, and actor. Raised primarily in Victoria, Australia, he worked as a photographer, playwright and theatre manager there and in New Zealand prior to his career in film. Early in his career, he was known by the name S. F. Travers Vale under which name he authored his first known play, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1888) which is an adaptation of the 1886 novel of the same name by Fergus Hume. He established his own theatre troupe, The Travers Vale Dramatic Company, which was in residence at the Theatre Royal, Adelaide in 1889 and the Auckland Opera House in New Zealand in 1890.

By 1898 he had moved to the United States with Vale's first original play written in that country being After the War. In 1901 he established the Travers Vale Stock Company which performed his original plays and with whom he also starred in productions of his own works. In the summers of 1901-1903 the troupe was in residence at the Heim brothers Electric Park Theater in Kansas City, Missouri.

After continuing to perform in vaudeville, Vale transitioned into a career as a director for silent films; directing more than 70 films between 1910 and 1926. He began his career in film with the New Jersey–based Champion Film Company and later worked for the Pilot Films Corporation, the Biograph Company, and Peerless Pictures Studios. From 1916 to 1920 he worked mainly for the World Film Company. In 1921 he established his own film production company in New York City, Travers Vale Productions, which made the film A Pasteboard Crown (1922). He then moved to Hollywood, where he filmed The Street of Tears (1924) and Western Pluck (1926). Several of his films made prior to his move to California featured his second wife, the actress Louise Vale, who died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

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