George Beban, was an American actor-director-writer-producer of silent pictures, formerly a singer and vaudevillian.
A native of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, he was one of four sons born to Rocco Beban, a Dalmatian immigrant, and Johanna Dugan, from County Cork, Ireland.
He exhibited singing talent at an early age and was known in San Francisco theater circles as "The Boy Baritone." By age 8, according to a 1920 newspaper interview, "[his] first professional job was singing at $8 a week at the Vienna Garden on Stockton Street. Then came boy parts with the McGuire, Rial and Osborne stock company at the Grand Opera house and the McKee Rankin stock company at the old California, where I used the name of George Dinks."
He played in vaudeville and legit theater for a number of years, primarily doing caricatured Frenchmen, before making his film debut in 1915.
In his play (later film) Sign of the Rose, (A.K.A. The Alien) and in Thomas Ince's The Italian, he sought to change the stereotype of Italian immigrants as all being members of The Black Hand (Mafioso).
Beban erected one of the first mansions at Palisades Del Rey; today called Playa Del Rey, CA.
In a freak accident in 1928, Beban died from injuries sustained when he was thrown from a horse while on vacation at the June Lodge dude ranch in Big Pine, California. He died from complications from the accident at the California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles
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