Henry Hull was born in Louisville, Kentucky on October 3, 1890, the son of drama critic William H. Hull and Elinor Bond Vaughan Hull. The elder Hull encouraged his children to enter the theatre and Henry's older brother Shelley had a successful stage career before an early death during the World War I influenza epidemic. Shelley's wife Josephine was also a successful actress. His other brother, Howard Hull, married and became the manager of actress Margaret Anglin. Henry Hull, however, studied engineering at the College of the City of New York (1904), Cooper Union (1906-1908), and Columbia University (1909) and briefly worked (1910-1911) as a mining engineer and a prospector in Quebec before settling on the theatre as a career.
Hull opened on Broadway in Green Stockings in 1911. In 1916 he made his first film, The Little Rebel, and thereafter he would be one of those actors who could successfully alternate between stage and screen. As a stage actor, Hull was best known for his interpretation of Jeeter Lester in the long-running, original Broadway production of Tobacco Road. Other successes in a continuous twenty-one year run on Broadway included The Ivory Door by A.A. Milne and The Masque of Kings by Maxwell Anderson. In addition, Hull wrote Congratulations (1929), in which he was also a featured player, and Manhattan with Leighton Osmun (1922).
In 1924 Hull recreated his Broadway role in The Man Who Came Back for the film of the same name. During the silent film era, Hull was a leading man for a number of films shot by East Coast studios, but with the advent of talking pictures he became well-known as a character actor with appearances in such films as Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), Objective Burma (1945), The Fountainhead (1949), The Return of Jesse James (1950), The Great Gatsby (1949), The Werewolf of London (in which he played the title role), and Great Expectations (1934). Hull gave up play acting in the 1950s and toured with a one-man show in which he portrayed Mark Twain. He later returned to Hollywood for appearances in The Buccaneer and Fool Killer.
Henry Hull died in 1977.
