Playing villains on stage, screen proved profitable for San Bernardino High actor

You probably never heard of an actor named Purnell Pratt, a local man whose conflicting talents made it tough to break into show business many years ago.

Pratt, who began acting while at San Bernardino High School in 1896, had both a profound bass voice — he once thought of singing opera — and a youthful appearance, a combination that just didn’t work well on the Broadway stage. Picture a young Luke Skywalker sounding like Darth Vader.

“I couldn’t get a ‘heavy’ role because I had a ‘juvenile’ appearance,” he recalled in a 1921 interview with the New York Tribune. “And I couldn’t get a ‘juvenile’ role because I had a ‘heavy’ voice.”

Finally, Pratt was offered a role in which those attributes didn’t matter much.

“This part is so disagreeable — you’ll be an out-and-out cad — that all you’