George Augustus Beringer (1893-1973) began his acting career in Australia before emigrating to the USA in 1912. He made his first screen appearances in Biograph shorts, before taking a featured role in D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), in which he also acted as an assistant director, and playing a priest in Intolerance (1916).
Beranger appeared in almost thirty silent features, including Broken Blossoms (1919) and Fig Leaves (1926), one of Howard Hawks’s first pictures. He also directed a dozen or so films, writing several of them.
Beranger’s career declined with the coming of sound, although he was in almost sixty more pictures, right through to the 1960s. These included The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Nightmare Alley (1947, playing The Geek) and Unfaithfully Yours (1947).
George Beranger featured in two MGM musicals, Hollywood Party and The Wizard of Oz.
In a number of films, Beranger was credited as Andre Beranger, or George Andre Beranger.
