Robert Entwistle

Robert Symes Entwistle, who was born in London on 1 January, 1872, worked on Broadway as a character comedy actor and as producer Charles Frohman's stage manager. He also appeared in the film The Beautiful Adventure (1917), that was based on a Frohman theatrical adaption of a popular French play by Robert de Flers and Gaston Arman de Caillavet. Not long after Charles Frohman was lost at sea during the sinking of the Lusitania, Entwistle retired from the stage and opened a small shop in New York on Madison Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street that sold designer gift boxes to upscale clientele. In 1904 Entwistle married Emily Stevenson in Birmingham, England. Their daughter, Lillian Millicent (Peg Entwistle), became known as one of the more tragic Hollywood figures, when, in 1931, she leaped to her death from atop one of the letters in the landmark Hollywoodland sign. Emily died in 1912 around the time Entwistle was brought to America by Charles Frohman. In 1914 he married, probably in New York, his sister-in-law, Lauretta Amanda Ross. Their union produced two sons, Milton and Robert, before her untimely death in 1921 at the age of 37 from spinal meningitis. On the evening of 2 November, 1922, Entwistle was run down by a limousine at the intersection of Park Avenue and Seventy- Second Street, as he was walking home from his place of business. Witnesses to the accident told police that the limousine's chauffeur stopped, got out of the vehicle for a moment and looked down on Entwistle's broken body before speeding off. Neither the driver nor the limousine was ever found. Robert Entwistle lingered for forty-eight days in a body caste with a broken spine before dying on 19 December at Prospects Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. He was survived by his three children, who were then raised by his brother, actor Harold Entwistle and his wife, former actress Jane Ross. Robert Symes Entwistle was interned at the Oak Hill cemetery, Glendale, Ohio in a grave that he now shares with his daughter Millicent.