He was born
Charles Willard McLaughlin in
Morrisburg, Ontario. At an early age his family moved to
Brooklyn, New York. After two years, they moved to
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where McLaughlin finished high school. His parents returned to Canada, but he went on to study at
Georgetown University in
Washington, D. C., where he became involved in student plays. Adopting the stage name Willard Mack, after graduation he took minor acting jobs for a few years and did
Shakespearian repertoire. However, writing scripts was what he was most interested in, and his second effort, about the
North-West Mounted Police,
In Wyoming, was a commercial success and was later the basis for his film
Nanette of the Wilds. Throughout his life, Mack frequently returned to Canada. Some of his other plays, including
Tiger Rose and
The Scarlet Fox, were set in northern
Alberta. In 1914 he made his
acting debut on
Broadway in a play he had written. Over the next fourteen years, he would write a further twenty-two Broadway productions, acting in ten of them and producing four. For a time, Willard Mack operated a stock company with actress
Maude Leone. In the mid-1920s, he met an aspiring stage actress named Ruby Stevens hired as a chorus girl for his new play. Mack coached Stevens's acting and rewrote parts of the play to expand her role and then persuaded her to change her name to
Barbara Stanwyck. During his time on Broadway, Mack began writing for
motion pictures, and although he performed in fifteen films and directed four, he was primarily a writer. At first he remained on the
east coast but later moved to
Los Angeles. A number of his plays were made into motion pictures, and between 1916 and 1933 he was involved with the writing of more than seventy film scripts. Starting out in
silent film, he made his
talkie debut as actor, director, and co-writer of the 1929 film
Voice of the City. In 1933 he directed
What Price Innocence?. He then wrote and directed
Broadway to Hollywood, a
backstage musical that spanned nearly five decades recounting the struggles of a
vaudeville family. He was married four times, to actresses
Maude Leone,
Marjorie Rambeau,
Pauline Frederick, and
Beatrice Banyard. His writing success made him a wealthy man. He died from heart disease at his home in
Brentwood, Los Angeles,
California in 1934. ) are faced with bills they cannot pay in a still from
The Corner (1916). ==Plays==