David Thomson was indeed correct when he said that McLaglen’s screen persona of imperial tough guy had actual “authentic grounding in personal experience.” 2 But when McLaglen arrived in California in 1924, he would find that his cinematic career would now become conflated with the Hollywood mythology of the British Empire, just as he himself became more immersed in the conflation of California and British culture in the so-called “Hollywood Raj” of the 1920s and 1930s, that collection of English actors living in luxurious, if self-imposed, isolation among the palm trees and Spanish Mission architecture of Hollywood. So taken was.
