Richard Cromwell (actor) - Early Life

Early Life

Cromwell was born in Long Beach, California on (1910-01-08)8 January 1910, the second-born in a family of five children. His father Ralph R. Radabaugh, an inventor. Cromwell's father Ralph R. Radabaugh's claim to fame was his patented invention of the "amusement park swing" ride, called the "Monoflyer", of which a variation can still be seen in use at most carnivals today. Ralph died suddenly from influenza during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, when Cromwell was still in grade school.

While helping his young widowed mother, Fay B. Stocking Radabaugh, to support the family with odd-jobs, Cromwell enrolled as a teenager in the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles on a scholarship. The Institute was the precursor of what later became California Institute of the Arts, and one of Cromwell's then-classmates would also eventually rise to fame as costume designer Edith Head. Cromwell ran a shop in Hollywood where he sold pictures, made lampshades and designed colour schemes for houses. As Cromwell developed his talents for lifelike mask-making and oil-painting, he curried friendships in the late 1920s with various then-starlets who posed for him and collected his works including Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford, Anna Q. Nilsson, Greta Garbo, Claire Dubrey, Ann Sothern, and even Marie Dressler (whom he would later share top-billing with in 1932's Emma). Other patrons of Cromwell's life masks included Broadway actresses Lilyan Tashman, Katharine Cornell, and Beatrice Lillie.