George Duane Baker was an American motion picture director whose career began near the dawn of the silent film era.
Early life
He was born at Champaign, Illinois on April 22, 1868. He was the second son and third child of Arminta and Charles E. Baker. Three or four years later a baby girl would close the gender gap before Baker’s father, an accountant and financial advisor, chose to relocate his family to the rural town of Beatrice, Nebraska sometime in the early 1880s. Upon his high school graduation, Charles Baker offered his son two options, a traditional college education or art classes in Paris. George Baker declined both offers and chose instead to attend the Dramatic Conservatory of Chicago, where he may have first met Walker Whiteside, another student of Prof. Kayzer's from around that time.
Career
He debuted with the young Shakespearian actor Walker Whiteside in Hamlet as Laertes and would later tour with companies headed by Nance O'Neil, McKee Rankin, David Higgins, Russ Wytal Brady and others. Baker spent a number of seasons in vaudeville with Sadie Martinot, Marie Dupont and Eva Taylor. He later worked as a producer, actor and playwright in partnership with James W. Castle on theatrical productions of Graustark, based on the book by George Barr McCutcheon and The Brothers Grimmfairy tale, The Goose Girl. Baker would some years later adapt both stories for film. Baker also penned the plays His Brother’s Birthright and As the Sun Went Down. Sometime around 1908 Baker joined Vitagraph Studios and began directing comedies starring John Bunny and Flora Finch and later went on direct such films as The Dust of Egypt, Tarantula, A Night Out and A Price for Folly. After three and a half years with Vitagraph, Baker joined Metro Studios where he soon rose to the position of Director General of Metro’s West Coast productions. While vacation in New York, after four years with Metro, Baker received a number of tempting job offers from competing studios. He chose instead to take advantage of his popularity by severing his ties with Metro to work as a freelance director on projects of his own choosing. George Baker wrote the scenarios for a number of the films and was responsible for almost all the continuity work on films he directed. He continued to work well into the 1920s before retiring in his late fifties.
Death
Besides his stage and film work, Baker had also done illustrations for newspapers and magazines and was known as an accomplished still photographer. He was well read with a special interest in the arts. George Duane Baker died at the age of sixty-five on June 2, 1933, in Hollywood, California.
