Josef Swickard

Josef Swickard was a Prussian-born American character actor who worked on the stage and in films. He left the German Empire for the United States in 1882, having spent years on the road with stock companies that toured Europe, South Africa and South America. In 1912 he began appearing on screen with D.W. Griffith, and two years later he was taking supporting parts for Mack Sennett, among them the Chaplin comedies Caught in a Cabaret and Laughing Gas. He worked with Sennett until 1917 and afterward settled into a busy run of aristocratic roles. His best-known part was Marcelo Desnoyers, a well-meaning but impractical French gentleman, in Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), and his other roles included the scheming Prime Minister Kruel in a 1925 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. In sound films his work was more limited, mostly low-budget pictures and action serials. He died in 1940.