The rugged good looks and easygoing masculinity of tall, square-jawed Richard Dix helped him forge a successful career as a hero of silent films, and his deep voice and natural delivery of lines allowed him to continue enjoying stardom after the arrival of the sound era. Along with Ronald Colman, he was one of a very few male stars to accomplish this feat. In all, Dix appeared in some 100 films.

Dix was a prominent leading man at RKO from the early 1930s, reaching a career peak with Cimarron (1931), which won an Oscar® as Best Picture and brought Dix a Best Actor nomination. Associated with "B"-movie heroics through the late 1930s and 1940s, Dix sometimes took on more complex characters, such as the obsessive-compulsive captain in The Ghost Ship (1943). He also brought a nice sense of ambiguity to his roles in "The Whistler" movies, a series of "B"-movie mysteries (1944-47) in which he alternately played hero and heavy.

Dix (1893-1949) was born Ernest Carlton Brimmer in St. Paul, Minn., and originally planned to become a surgeon. But, while studying at the University of Minnesota, he became involved in campus plays and decided upon an acting career. Following stock-company work, service in World War I and a brief stint on Broadway, he made his film debut in Not Guilty (1921).

Signed to a long-term contract at Paramount Pictures, Dix quickly became a leading man in the strong/silent mold, typically playing a modest, stalwart hero moved to violence only when provoked. Among his notable roles in silent films were those of the hero in the modern portion of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923), a film director in Souls for Sale (1923) and an Indian in The Vanishing American (1925).

Dix began the RKO phase of his career with a strong role in the much-filmed mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate (1929). In the comedy Lovin' the Ladies (1930) he plays the subject of an experiment by a scientist who believes a man and a woman can be made to fall in love through prearranged circumstances. Cimarron, co-starring Irene Dunne, is based on the Edna Ferber novel about the Oklahoma land rush. Despite this triumph, Dix's studio continued to cast him in such programmers as The Public Defender (1931), in which he plays a man who poses as a criminal to trap some crooked financiers; Secret Service (1931), a Civil War story; and Hell's Highway (1932), with Dix as a framed prison inmate who attempts to escape.

Dix joins Joel McCrea and Robert Armstrong in The Lost Squadron (1932) in playing World War I flying aces who become stunt pilots in Hollywood; it was the first RKO movie on which David O. Selznick is credited as executive producer. In Day of Reckoning (1933), on loan-out to MGM, Dix is a Depression-era husband who ends up in prison after his nagging wife pushes him deeply into debt. Back at RKO, he was a hard-drinking reporter in No Marriage Ties (1933), a WWI pilot again in Ace of Aces (1933) and a self-sacrificing father in His Greatest Gamble (1934).

The Arizonian (1935), a well-produced Western with Dix as a Wyatt Earp-like character called Clay Tallant, is reminiscent of Cimarron. Dix again took to the wild blue yonder in two more aviation dramas, Sky Giant (1938), with Joan Fontaine, and Men Against the Sky (1940), with Wendy Barrie. Blind Alibi (1938) features "Ace the Wonder Dog," RKO's answer to Rin Tin Tin, with Dix as a man who pretends to be blind in order to recover some incriminating letters.

Dix started his franchise at Columbia with The Whistler (1944). After his final appearance in the series, The Thirteenth Hour (1947), he died prematurely at age 55 of a heart attack. Married twice, he had four children including actor Robert Dix.

by Roger Fristoe