British postcard in the Cinema Favourites series by Photochrom Co., London, Ref. 102. Photo: Triangle.
American actress Bessie Love (1898-1986) was introduced to the cinema by D.W. Griffith. He also gave the actress her screen name. She played innocent young girls and wholesome leading ladies in silent films and early talkies. Her acting career spanned eight decades, and her role in The Broadway Melody (1929) earned her a nomination for the Oscar for Best Actress.
Bessie Love was born Juanita Horton in 1898 in Midland, Texas. Her cowboy father moved the family to Arizona, New Mexico, and then to Hollywood, where he became a chiropractor. As the family needed money, Bessie's mother sent her to Biograph Studios, hoping she would become an actress. Pioneering film director D.W. Griffith saw she was pretty and had some acting talent. He put her in several of his films, including a small part in Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (D.W. Griffith, 1916). Love dropped out of Los Angeles High School to pursue her film career, although she completed her diploma many years later. Her first important role was in the drama The Flying Torpedo (John B. O'Brien, Christy Cabanne, 1916), starring John Emerson. Bessie became popular with audiences and worked with Douglas Fairbanks in Reggie Mixes In (Christy Cabanne, 1916) and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (John Emerson, Christy Cabanne, 1916). William S. Hart was her co-star in The Aryan (Reginald Barker, William S. Hart, Clifford Smith, 1916). She then moved to Vitagraph and starred in a number of comedy-dramas. She took an active role in the management of her career, upgrading her representation to Gerald C. Duffy, the former editor of Picture-Play Magazine, and publicising herself by playing the ukulele and dancing for members of the military. In 1922, Love was chosen as a WAMPAS Baby Star. In the 1920s she began to act in more mature roles. In 1923, she starred in Human Wreckage (John Griffith Wray, 1923), with Dorothy Davenport and produced by Thomas Ince. The next year, she starred in Those Who Dance (Lambert Hillyer, 1924), opposite Blanche Sweet. She also began to work on the stage. She performed the first screen Charleston dance in The King on Main Street (Monta Bell, 1925) starring Adolphe Menjou. Her technique was documented in instructional guides, including a series of photographs by Edward Steichen. She subsequently performed the dance the following year in The Song and Dance Man (Herbert Brenon, 1926). She also starred in The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925), a science fiction adventure based on the novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Love gave one of her best performances in Dress Parade (Donald Crisp, 1927) with William Boyd. The following year, she starred in The Matinee Idol (1928), a romantic comedy directed by a young Frank Capra. In 1929, she married agent William B. Hawks. They would have one child, Patricia (1932), and divorced in 1936. It would be her only marriage.
Bessie Love toured with a musical revue for sixteen weeks. The experience she gained on the vaudeville stage singing and dancing in three performances a day prepared her for the introduction of sound films. When sound came into vogue, Bessie Love made a number of them and received an Academy Award nomination for The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929). The success of the film resulted in a 5-year contract with MGM and an increase in her weekly salary. By 1931, however, her career was over. She moved to England in 1935 and did stage work and occasional films there. Love briefly returned to the United States in 1936 to seek a divorce. During World War II, she entertained the troops and also worked for the Red Cross. By the 1950s she started playing small roles in films such as No Highway (Henry Koster, 1951), starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, and The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954) with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. In England, Love had a substantial supporting part and received fifth billing in Ealing Studios' Nowhere to Go (Seth Holt, 1958) with George Nader and Maggie Smith in her film debut. She also played small roles in The Greengage Summer (Lewis Gilbert, 1961) starring Kenneth More, the James Bond thriller On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969) with Geoge Lazenby and Diana Rigg, and in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). She played the mother of Vanessa Redgrave's titular character in Isadora (Karel Reisz, 1968). In the 1980s she appeared in the big-budget Ragtime (Milos Forman, 1981) which starred James Cagney, and later that year in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981) which starred Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Her final film was the erotic horror film The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), starring Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie. Bessie Love passed away in 1986 in London, England, UK.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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British postcard by Photochrom Co. Ltd., London no. 111. Photo: Triangle / Keystone. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
Louise Fazenda (1895-1962) was a gawky, highly popular funny girl in slapstick comedies for Keystone Studios. She paired up well with comedian Charlie Murray. Her best-known character was her country bumpkin - complete with spit curls, multiple pigtails, and calico dresses. In the early 1920s, Louise left Sennett's company and progressed to feature films, where her eccentric talents were greatly utilised in musicals and knockabout comedies.
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British postcard. Cinema Favourites was a series of Photochrom Co. Ltd. of London, in collaboration with the American film company Triangle Pictures.
Norma Talmadge (1894–1957) was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box-office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.
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British postcard in the 'Cinema Favourites' series by Photochrom Co. Ltd., London, in conjunction with Triangle Plays. Photo: Triangle.
American actress Dorothy Gish was the sister of silent film star Lilian Gish. D.W. Griffith discovered the two girls in 1912 and they starred in his epics Hearts of the World (1918) and Orphans of the Storm (1921).
Dorothy Elizabeth Gish was born in 1898 in Massillon, Ohio, USA. Her restless father, traveling salesman James Lee Gish was frequently absent and later abandoned his family. Her mother, Mary Robinson McConnell a.k.a. Mary Gish, entered into acting to make money to support the family. As soon as Dorothy and her sister Lillian Gish were old enough, they became part of the act. In 1902, at the age of four, Dorothy made her stage debut portraying the character Little Willie in 'East Lynne', an adaptation of the 1861 English novel by Ellen Wood. In 1912 they met fellow child actress Mary Pickford, and she got both of them extra work with Biograph Pictures in New York at salaries of 50 dollars a week. Director D.W. Griffith was impressed by both the girls and cast them in An Unseen Enemy (D.W. Griffith, 1912), their first picture. Dorothy would go on to star in over 100 two-reel films and features over the years. She would appear in the very successful Judith of Bethulia (D.W. Griffith, 1914) with Blanche Sweet and Henry B. Walthall. Griffith did not use Dorothy in any of his earliest epics, but while he spent months working on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Dorothy was featured in many feature-length films made under the banner of Triangle and Mutual releases. They were directed by young Griffith protégés such as Donald Crisp, James Kirkwood, and Christy Cabanne. Elmer Clifton directed a series of seven Paramount-Artcraft comedies with Dorothy that were so successful and popular that the tremendous revenue they raked in helped to pay the cost of Griffith’s expensive epics. These films were wildly popular with the public and the critics. She specialised in pantomime and light comedy, while her sister appeared in tragic roles. Then the two sisters made a number of films together, including the extremely successful Hearts of the World (D.W. Griffith, 1918) and Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921). In both films, Dorothy would play French girls, but in different periods of time. Wikipedia about Hearts of the World: "In the 1918 release Hearts of the World, a film about World War I and the devastation of France, Dorothy found her first cinematic foothold in comedy, striking a personal hit in a role that captured the essence of her sense of humor. As the 'little disturber', a street singer, her performance was the highlight of the film, and her characterization on screen catapulted her into a career as a star of comedy films." Dorothy became famous in a series of Griffith-supervised comedies for the Triangle-Fine Arts and Paramount companies from 1918 through 1920. Almost all of these films are now considered to be lost.
While Dorothy Gish would excel in pantomime and light comedy, her popularity would always be overshadowed by that of her sister Lillian, who was considered to be one of the silent screen's greatest stars. Lillian would try her hand at directing, with a film called Remodeling Her Husband (Lillian Gish, 1920), which starred Dorothy and James Rennie. Dorothy and James married later that year. Dorothy would only make a handful of films in the 1920s. In the costume film Romola (Henry King, 1924) about Italy in the Middle Ages, she would again co-star with Lillian. By 1926 Dorothy had moved to England, where she would star as the title figure in Nell Gwyn (Herbert Wilcox, 1926). The success led to three more British films. Her last silent film would be Madame Pompadour (Herbert Wilcox, 1927) with Antonio Moreno. When the film industry converted to talking pictures, Dorothy made one in 1930, the British crime drama Wolves (Albert de Courville, 1930) with Charles Laughton. Earlier, in 1928 and 1929, her performances in the Broadway play 'Young Love' and her work with director George Cukor renewed her interest in stagecraft and in the immediacy of performing live again. After that, she enjoyed a long career on the stage. Only incidentally, she accepted film offers. Director Otto Preminger cast Dorothy in his 1946 film, Centennial Summer. Her final film appearance was in The Cardinal (Otto Preminger, 1963). Gish had divorced James Rennie in 1935. Dorothy never married again. In 1968, Dorothy Gish passed away by bronchial pneumonia in Rapallo, Italy. She was 70. Her remains were interred at Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City. In 1976, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater was dedicated on the Bowling Green State University campus in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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British postcard in the Cinema Favourites series by Photochrom Co. Ltd., London in Conjunction with Triangle Plays, no. 101. Photo: Triangle.
American actress Bessie Barriscale (1884-1965) was a silent movie star in the 1910s. Hollywood marketed her as the "girl with the biggest eyes". Barriscale became one of the highest-paid actresses of the time.
Bessie Barriscale was born in 1884 in Hoboken, New Jersey as Elizabeth Barry Scale. Her parents were Irish immigrants and the actresses Edith and Mabel Taliaferro were her cousins. Since the 1900s, Barriscale had been a regular on theatre stages, and she made her first film in 1913. She became widely known to film audiences in 1914 with her leading role in the western Rose of the Rancho, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, which was a big box-office hit at the time. She had previously played the role of Rose in a play. In the following years, she cemented her status as a Hollywood star with leading roles in several melodramas directed by Thomas Harper Ince. Mostly, Barriscale played the role of the equally lovely and long-suffering girl who has to fight her way through bad circumstances. She was marketed, among other things, as the "girl with the biggest eyes" in Hollywood. However, many of her most important films are now lost.
In 1918 Bessie Barriscale signed a contract for 16 films with B.B. (Bessie Barriscale) Features, which earned her at least one million US dollars and made her one of the highest-paid actresses of the time. In the early 1920s, her career slowly passed its zenith and she subsequently made fewer films, instead, she was now seen more often again in the theatre and on vaudeville stages. At the beginning of the talkies, Barriscale only played character roles, mostly as a mother or servant in supporting roles. Barriscale's most significant performance of the talkies was probably her portrayal of Mary Pickford's unfriendly daughter in Frank Borzage's epic western Secrets (1933). Her last film role was as a maid in The Man Who Reclaimed His Head in 1934 alongside Claude Rains and Joan Bennett. Bessie Barriscale was married to fellow actor Howard C. Hickman for many years until his death in 1949. The couple also worked together on many films. Barriscale and Hickman were buried in Mount Tamalpais Cemetery in San Rafael. In 1960, five years before her death, Bessie Barriscale received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her film work.
Sources: Women Film Pioneers Project, Wikipedia (German and English), and IMDb.
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