Fred Church

American actor of silent films who focused primarily on Westerns. A native of Ontario, Iowa, Church attended school in his father's home state of Michigan and later lived in Denver, Colorado. He became a vaudeville performer and stage actor and spent several years traveling the country in various stock productions. The Essanay studio hired him and he appeared with Essanay's star and co-founder Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson in numerous films. Starring roles in films for other studios made him popular, especially in action films, particularly Westerns. With the arrival of sound, he began to withdraw from pictures, ultimately retiring completely by the mid-Thirties. Church lived nearly another half century in retirement in Quartzite, Arizona. He died at 93 a few miles from Quartzite, in a Blythe, California nursing home, of heart failure.