Kenneth Alexander (photographer)


Kenneth Alexander was a photographer for United Artists and 21st Century Fox, known for his photographs of such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Gish, Betty Blythe, and Vilma Bánky.

Early years

Kenneth Alexander in London on March 3, 1887, the son of Alexander Fyfe Alexander, and Alice Alexander, and educated at Bedford Modern School. He was sixteen when his family emigrated to New York City in 1903 after which he studied art at the London Polytechnic and the New York School of Art.

Career

Alexander commenced his photographic training with Vandyke as its London Court photographer and then to HH Pierce of Boston before joining Ernest Walter Histed, an ‘expert at dramatic portrait in low light settings’.
At the age of 19 he started working freelance in Millville, New Jersey specialising in home portraiture. His work achieved ‘national notice’ in 1907 when a photograph of the painter Arthur Wesley Dow ‘topped the portrait category in the Third American Salon’ at the Toledo Museum of Art and was featured in The American Amateur Photographer’. Alexander became a US citizen in 1914 and ‘his growing fame allowed him to move to celebrity portraiture’.
Alexander's interaction with the world of celebrity led to romance when he fell in love with the silent movie actress, Mollie King, whom he married in 1919. The couple moved to New York to encourage her work on Broadway and he quickly established himself as a photographer there with a tagline, "Photographer of Women Exclusively", a gender reversal of Pirie MacDonald's motto. He gained particular acclaim with United Artists during his time in New York assisting them and other film companies with offices in the city.
After New York Alexander moved to Los Angeles at the behest of Lillian Gish, who wanted him as a photographer on her film La Bohème. Alexander eventually settled in Hollywood, where he was employed by Sam Goldwyn Productions throughout the 1930s.

Filmography