Lambert Hillyer

Newspaperman, short-story writer, vaudevillian and stock actor who broke into film in the early teens and directed scores of low-budget productions over the next three decades. Hillyer cranked out a host of silent westerns for stars such as William S. Hart and Tom Mix, many of them expert examples of Western genre entertainment, before moving onto romantic dramas, crime melodramas and thrillers. One of his best-remembered films is "Dracula's Daughter" (1936), a subtle, atmospheric sequel which proved superior as a film to the Universal hit of five years earlier which spawned it. Hillyer spent the last part of his career at Monogram in the 1940s.