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Zorro began as a character in an All-Star Weekly magazine serial called ‘The Curse of Capistrano.’ Already the most bankable star in Hollywood, Fairbanks had the clout to produce anything he liked and thought Zorro would suit him perfectly. Fairbanks was worried audiences would struggle to accept him in a role that was so different to anything he had done before, so he filmed a comedy called The Nut (Theodore Reed 1921) just in case The Mark of Zorro bombed.

The term swashbuckler existed before Fairbanks and the movies. It was initially used to describe swordsmen, but eventually became associated with fictional stories of chivalry such as Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.. Fairbanks brought this spirit of adventure to the movies and despite being in his late thirties when he filmed The Mark of Zorro moved with remarkable agility and grace turning himself into the silver screen’s first action hero.