Tyrone Power recently terminated his acting contract at Twentieth Century Fox and declared “he was out to see the world”.

The popular star’s first role as a freelance artist is a top role with Piper Laurie and Julia Adams in Universal-International’s Technicolor “The Mississippi Gambler”.

“They got so used to me around Twentieth Century Fox”, Ty recalls “that they used to count me among the annual inventory of props.”

Power believes that his over fifteen year stint at a single studio had both its advantages and disadvantages. Summing it all up, he felt that the advantage of being able to pick his own pictures via the freelance route offered him more than yearly salary security and protected him against roles which weren’t to his liking.

“I felt like a total stranger to the industry when I first walked on the set of ‘The Mississippi Gambler’, the actor admitted to friends. “The technical crews were all people I had never seen before. There was a different crew behind the camera. Makeup men I had never seen before dabbed greasepaint on my face. It was all rather frightening at first.”

Paradoxically, it was on the old Universal lot that Power made his unnoticed film debut. That was twenty years ago when the young actor - he was known as Tyrone Power, Jr. then - was picked by Director William Wyler to play a one-line bit role in “Tom Brown of Culver”.

The plush, five-room dressing room bungalow occupied by Power during the filming of “The Mississippi Gambler” stood within a stone’s throw of the spot occupied by the small circus tent in which he “dressed” along with thirty or forty other bit players in 1931.

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