Joseph Henabery

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Joseph Henabery as Abraham Lincoln in Birth of a Nation.

Joseph Henabery (15 January 1888) Omaha, Nebraska, was a US film actor and director.

Henabery's acting career began in The Joke on Yellentown (1914). Henabery appeared in the D.W. Griffith directed silent film classic Birth of a Nation (1915) as Abraham Lincoln. From 1914 to 1917 he appeared in seventeen films. Henabery also worked as a second-unit director on Griffith's Intolerance, and supervised the filming of at least one extended sequence that appeared in the film. Throughout the rest of his career he worked as a director. From the mid-1920's, and after professional disagreements with both Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Adolph Zukor at Paramount, Henabery found employment as a director for smaller Hollywood studios. His career as a director of feature films ended by the late 1930s.

Although Henabery's impersonation of Lincoln was a masterpiece of facial makeup, Henabery was significantly shorter than Lincoln. Kevin Brownlow's book The Parade's Gone By contains a photo of Henabery in costume and makeup as Lincoln, seated in a chair with planks placed on the floor under Henabery's feet so that his knees are raised several inches; this effect (with the planks kept off-camera in the movie) made Henabery's legs appear several inches longer than they actually were.

Henabery died (18 February 1976) in Los Angeles California.

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