Carlyle Blackwell went to England in 1921 and played the first Bulldog Drummond in film, in a movie called Bulldog Drummond (1922).

Blackwell was born in Syracuse, New York. He was married three times, first to actress Ruth Hartman, who was the mother of his daughter and son. In 1923, he divorced Hartman for desertion. In 1926, he married his second wife Leah Barnato, known as the “Queen of Diamonds,” the daughter of a South African diamond millionaire and sister of Woolf Barnato. His third wife was former Ziegfeld girl Avonne Taylor, whom he met on a transatlantic crossing and married in 1933 after divorcing Leah Blackwell in 1932. In 1934, the couple purchased a farmhouse estate in Brookfield, Connecticut. He died in Miami, Florida in 1955, aged 71. His son, Carlyle Blackwell, Jr., an actor also, died in Hollywood, California in 1974.