Cat. #00151531: WALTER HIERS

Scarce vintage inscribed blue fountain pen signature on a 4x6-inch tan album page, acquired in-person by inveterate collector Saul Goodman around 1930. In good condition. Note that the image of the star, shown here alongside the scan of the autograph, is not included. 235-pound vaudeville and silent comedy star Walter Hiers, who occasionally dabbled in drama, was memorable in films like Seventeen (1916), The Mysterious Miss Terry (1917), What's Your Husband Doing? (1920) with Douglas MacLean, A City Sparrow (1920), James Cruze's Mrs. Temple's Telegram (1920) and Is Matrimony a Failure? (1922), The Fourteenth Man (1920), Sham (1921), Bought and Paid For (1922), Wesley Ruggles' Mr. Billings Spends His Dime (1923), Harold Lloyd's Speedy (1928) and A Holy Terror (1931). In 1922, he headlined as Rusty Snow in the now lost early horror flick The Ghost Breaker (1922), which starred Arthur Edmund Carewe as a madman manufacturing spirit apparitions to torment visitors to his Spanish castle. It was remade as The Ghost Breakers in 1940, with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard replacing Wallace Reid and Lila Lee as the male and female leads.  With his career completely decimated by the advent of talking pictures, Hiers slipped into obscurity by the early 1930s and unceremoniously died at age 39, attributed to pneumonia related to his ever-expanding weight.