George Augustus Beringer was born in Enmore, New South Wales, Australia, as the youngest of five sons to Caroline Mondientz Beringer and Adam Beringer, a German engine fitter.
When George was just three years old, his mother committed suicide, and his father's new wife, who had taken over the household, turned the boys out of the house when they reached the age of fourteen.
George moved to Sydney, where he attended the College of Elocution and Dramatic Art run by Walter Bentley. At the age of sixteen, he began playing Shakespearean roles with the Walter Bentley Players.
In July 1912, George entered Vancouver illegally on a steamship. Several months later, he was photographed with stage and screen actor Donald Crisp in Union Square, New York, which was then the city's theater district and close to D.W. Griffith's Biograph studios.
George took the pseudonym George Andre de Beranger and began acting in silent films in which Griffith had a role. In 1913, he acted in five Biograph films, and by 1914, he was playing the part of young southerner Duke Cameron in Griffith's Civil War blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915),as well as taking the role of Griffith's assistant director, among numerous other roles.
In 1917, the press announced that George was going to enlist in the Australian army, but by July 1918, Paramount's press department was informing the public that he had been discharged from the Canadian Royal Flying Corps due to severe illness, but that he intended returning to service after recuperating, but the war ended before he did so.
It was common for performers to fabricate fake backstories, and George's media, fan letters, and press books were consistently filled with stories about his French parentage, that his birth took place on a French ocean liner off the coast of Australia, and that he had received his education in Paris.
