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Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C. 2. NB IMDb does not list a Alma Taylor film with the title The Girl Who Believed, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.
Alma Taylor (1895-1974) was a British actress, who peeked in the British silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1915 readers of Pictures and Picturegoers voted her most popular British performer, beating even Charlie Chaplin. Taylor acted in over 1
Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C. 2. NB IMDb does not list a Alma Taylor film with the title The Girl Who Believed, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.
Alma Taylor (1895-1974) was a British actress, who peeked in the British silent cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. In 1915 readers of Pictures and Picturegoers voted her most popular British performer, beating even Charlie Chaplin. Taylor acted in over 150 films, among which some prestigious examples like Shadow of Egypt (1924) by Sidney Morgan.
Alma Taylor was born in London, on 3 January 1895. According to Anthony Slide, brunette, blue-eyed Alma Taylor was the Hepworth actress 'par excellence'. Beginning in 1907, she already acted with producer Cecil Hepworth, playing tragic young girls. She then co-starred with Chrissie White in Hepworth's 'Tilly Girl' comic series (1910-1915) about two naughty schoolgirls, as well as in 75 or more short and long subjects by Hepworth, such as the Dickens adaptations Oliver Twist (1912), David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley) and The Old Curiosity Shop (Bentley 1913). In those days , everyone helped out at the studios, so both Alma and Chrissie helped in the processing rooms when the weather was too poor to shoot. During the First World War and soon after Taylor contributed to the war effort by acting in such propaganda films like The Nature of the Beast (Hepworth 1919). Taylor clearly was the producer's favorite, and remained devoted to him for decades, starring opposite Ralph Forbes in the rather old-fashioned British countryside drama Comin' Thro the Rye (1923), a remake of an earlier version by Hepworth. After a temporal absence from the screen, Hepworth relaunched Taylor in his last film, The House of Marney (1926), with John Longden. In 1924, the Daily News named her, along with Betty Balfour, Britain's top star. Alma Taylor only starred in four non-Hepworth films: The Shadow of Egypt (Sidney Morgan, 1924) with Joan Morgan, Quinneys (Maurice Elvey, 1927), A South Sea Bubble (T. Hays Hunter 1928) with Ivor Novello, and Two Little Drummer Boys (G.B.Samuelson, 1928). In the late silent era she did some German films, including her part of Mrs. Barrymore in Der Hund von Baskerville/ The Hound of the Baskervilles (Richard Oswald 1929), a film longtime considered lost but rediscovered in 2009. With the coming of sound, however, Taylor's career dwindled and she had to satisfy with minor, matronly roles, in small number of films, such as Bachelor's Baby (Harry Hughes, 1932), Things Are Looking Up (Albert de Courville, 1935), Lilacs in the Spring (Herbert Wilcox, 1954), and Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (Frank Launder, 1957). Uncredited, she played a box office woman in Hitchcock's second vserion of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Probably her last part was the uncredited role of an old lady in the Titanic-drama by Rank, A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958). Alma Taylor died in London, 23 January 1974. She was the wife of film producer and director Walter West (1885-1958), who in the late 1910s and early 1920s was the regular director of Violet Hopson, first with his company Broadwest (1914-1921) and then for Hopson's own company.
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Vintage British postcard. Lubin, 1910s, No. 45. Photo by Gilbert & Bacon, Philadelphia, 1916.
Eleanor Caines (1870 or 1880-1913) was an American silent film actress. She spent most of her film career at the Lubin Film Company. According to IMDb, Eleanor Caines was born in 1870 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1909, she began her film career at Lubin in the short comedy Blissville the Beautiful (1909) with George Reehm and Harry Myers. In t
Vintage British postcard. Lubin, 1910s, No. 45. Photo by Gilbert & Bacon, Philadelphia, 1916.
Eleanor Caines (1870 or 1880-1913) was an American silent film actress. She spent most of her film career at the Lubin Film Company. According to IMDb, Eleanor Caines was born in 1870 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1909, she began her film career at Lubin in the short comedy Blissville the Beautiful (1909) with George Reehm and Harry Myers. In the following years, she appeared in some 30 Lubin productions. Eleanor Caines died in 1913 in her hometown Philadelphia at the age of 43. The cause of her death was surgery after an accident. She was married to William Robson with whom she had a child, and till her death to Jack Le Faint.
Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:
Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C., 3. NB IMDb does not list a Chrissie White film with the title The Winning Smile, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.
British actress Chrissie White (1895-1989) was one of the most famous and popular stars of British silent cinema.
Blue-eyed and light-haired beauty Chrissie White was born Ada Constance White in Chiswick, London, on 23rd May 1895 – the year film was
Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. P.C., 3. NB IMDb does not list a Chrissie White film with the title The Winning Smile, so it may just be a tagline accentuating what we see.
British actress Chrissie White (1895-1989) was one of the most famous and popular stars of British silent cinema.
Blue-eyed and light-haired beauty Chrissie White was born Ada Constance White in Chiswick, London, on 23rd May 1895 – the year film was introduced by the Lumière brothers. She started her film career when joining the Hepworth company in 1907 as a 12-year-old girl. Under the name of ‘ Chrissie’ she became one of the first stars in British cinema, often performing in shorts by director Lewin Fitzhamon, in particular the Tilly comedies. When White was teamed with Alma Taylor, they became a popular comic duo as the naughty schoolgirls Tilly and Sally, who create havoc everywhere. The Tilly comedies were a popular series in the years 1910 and 1911. NB White supposedly rode to the studios on a bicycle in her early years as a star.
One by one, White moved from comedy to drama and romance. By 1912 Chrissie White had become Hepworth’s leading lady and the most popular British star of her time. In the same year she married Claude Witten, who also worked for Hepworth. One of her earliest features was a crime film set in the horse racing milieu: The Kissing Cup (1913); it still survives in the Dutch Desmet Collection, as well as the Tilly comedy Tilly in a Boarding House (1911). Other memorable titles were The Vicar of Wakefield (1913), and At the Foot of the Scaffold (1913). Chrissie White’s male partners in her films were mostly Lionelle Howard (from 1914 on); Stewart Rome (between 1914-1917), a.o. in Coward! (1915) and Her Boy (1915); and Henry Edwards (from 1918 on).
Edwards also directed most of their films together, such as Possession (1919), The City of Beautiful Nonsense (1919), The Kinsman (1919), The Bargain (1921) and Lily of the Alley (1923). All in all they did some 22 films together. They were also a couple in real life, as White married Edwards in 1922, and they had a daughter Henrietta, who also became an actress. Edwards and White became real celebrities in Britain, the equivalent of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. White's last silent film with Edwards was the romance The World of Wonderful Reality (1924).
When Hepworth collapsed in 1924, Chrissie White - who had worked only for Hepworth - retired from the screen, to the regret of her fans. She returned in the sound era to play in only two films more, with Edwards as her male partner: The Call of the Sea (Leslie Hiscott 1930) and the comedy General John Regan (Edwards 1933), filmed in Northern Ireland. After that White definitively retired from the screen, and after the death of Edwards in 1952 she withdrew from publicity at all. Estimates are that Chrissie White worked in between 100 and 180 films, shorts and features. Chrissie White died 18/8/1989 in Hollywood, California, and was buried at the Westwood Memorial Park.
Clips of Chrissie White's films can be traced in the BBC/BFI documentary Silent Britain (2006). See also on YouTube Tilly, the Tomboy, Gives to the Poor www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac1dVYaPN8I
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German postcard by Photochemie, no. K 120. Photo: Alex Binder, Berlin.
Maria Orska (1893-1930) was a Russian-Jewish actress of the German stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s.
On 16 March 1893 Maria Orska was born Effi Rahel Blindermann in Nikolayev, Russian Empire (now Mikolaiv in Ukraine). She was the cousin of the German actress Hedda Forsten and by her mother parented to the theatre impresario Eugen Frankfurter. Although she originally wante
German postcard by Photochemie, no. K 120. Photo: Alex Binder, Berlin.
Maria Orska (1893-1930) was a Russian-Jewish actress of the German stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s.
On 16 March 1893 Maria Orska was born Effi Rahel Blindermann in Nikolayev, Russian Empire (now Mikolaiv in Ukraine). She was the cousin of the German actress Hedda Forsten and by her mother parented to the theatre impresario Eugen Frankfurter. Although she originally wanted to study law like her father wanted to, she became a stage actress and was discovered by the German actor and drama teacher Ferdinand Gregori when in St. Petersburg. In 1909 he brought her to Vienna's conservatory "k.u.k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst" (today Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), led by him. In 1910, she followed Gregori to the Mannheim court theater where she debuted as "Daisy Orska" and soon drew attention to herself in plays by Strindberg and Schnitzler. In 1911 she came to the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where quickly she became the star of the company. In the season 1914/1915 Maria Orska, her stage name by now, moved to Berlin, where she performed at the "Theater in der Königgrätzer Straße" (today "Hebbel-Theater") as well as Max Reinhardt’s Berlin stage. In the same year Edith Andreae was introduced to her, with whom she held a longlasting friendship.
In Berlin the exiled Russian artist became known as interpreter of the works by modern playwrights such as Wilde, Strindberg, Schnitzler, Wedekind and Pirandello. She was a huge success in Wedekind’s Lulu in 1917. "She had sharp, piercing tones, the uncanny effect of which the little character fanatically exaggerated. She also cultivated mundane roles, in which she unfolded the pointed humours of a devious character ... In the field of erotic representation she dared to go remarkably far. She was not an elementary artist, but she had individual qualities that made her the darling of the audience“, the reporter and author Emil Faktor noted in the Berliner Börsen-Courier (16.05.1930) in occasion of her tragic death.
Since her marriage to her second husband, Baron Dr. Hans von Bleichröder jun. (1888 - 1938), a grandson of the Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder, the ambitious Maria Orska maintained an elaborate lifestyle. For a long time, she was at the center of so-called Berlin society, and also knew how to stage herself in private as an eccentric spectacle. Her popularity was reinforced by cinema. In 1915 she began a second career as a silent film actor and soon received top salaries. Maria Orska gave her screen debut at the Greenbaum-Film GmbH in Richard Oswald's melodrama Dämon und Mensch (Demon and Man, 1915) and played the shady Lina, who wants to take a cleansed criminal (Rudolf Schildkraut) away from the path of virtue. Maria Orska worked for the first time with the filmmaker and director Max Mack (1884 - 1973) in Das tanzende Herz (The Dancing Heart, 1916), which effected in a six-part Maria Orska film series for the cinemas in 1916/17, with Orska herself as protagonist in each film. The star was praised as "the unmatched interpreter of Strindberg's women, the most fashionable actress of today's Berlin". She was the representative of an "art entirely dedicated to nerves" (Der Film, no. 23, 01.07.1916). As a girl from the gutter she presented herself in Der Sumpf (The Gutter, 1916), but also in comedies such as Die Sektwette (The Champagne Bet, 1916) she was able to win the audience for herself.
But it was mostly the melodramas of those years in which Maria Orska performed the type of the wicked woman. After the dramatic film Adamant's Letztes Rennen (Adamant’s Last Race, 1917) and Der lebende Tote (The Living Dead, 1917), she was for Max Mack Die schwarze Loo (Black Lu, 1917), a gypsy woman who becomes the talk of the town, and who almost wrecks the marriage of a musician (Bruno Kastner). Director Max Mack abducts his audience into the dazzling half-world of the imperial capital. The acclaimed Maria Orska acted as Black Lu, who is constantly surrounded both in the demimonde world and high society. Between push dancing and amorous intrigue, the film develops its highly dared action for those days in expressive images and pointed situations, in which with remarkable determination the stern morality of the late German Imperial Empire is shaken.
Die schwarze Loo was the last part of the Maria -Orska-series, which Mack realized for the Greenbaum-Film. Then Maria Orska paused from the film business and focused on her work at the theater for the next three years. In 1920 she reappeared on screen in the film Die letzte Stunde (The Last Hour), directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, and the Emile Zola adaptation Die Bestie im Menschen (The Human Beast, Ludwig Wolff 1921), Der Streik der Diebe (The Thieves’ Strike, Alfred Abel 1921), and Paul Czinner's drama Opfer der Leidenschaft (Victims of Passion, 1922) as female partner of Paul Bildt. With the role of the capricious dancer Barberina Campanini in the first and third part of the Fridericus Rex series (Sturm und Drang, 1922; Sanssouci, 1923) Maria Orska finished her film career.
Orska’s attempt to become a theatrical actress in Paris failed. Disappointed, the celebrated artist returned to Berlin and accepted commitments at the Komödienhaus, the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater. In 1927 for instance, in Hans Kaltneker's mystery play The Sisters at the theater in the Königgrätzer Strasse in Berlin, Orska played the lesbian Ruth. More and more however, Orska’s health visibly deteriorated by her morphine addiction. Divorced since 1925 by her husband, Dr. Hans von Bleichröder, Maria Orska became the talk of the town because of her own desire for death and her drug consumption. Nurses waited on the side stage with a syringe, directors dreaded every performance. Her suicide attempts - once she jumped off a train - soon became routine for the public. "They had an already typical character, they were each time after a rest and detox pause in the sanatorium, which the demon hunted artist used to leave like a fury, in order to escape from a life that had become worthless for her", Emil Faktor wrote in 1930.
All rehab attempts by Orska proved failing. She finally poisoned herself by an overdose of Veronal. The actress was brought to the Viennese General Hospital, where she died on May 16, 1930, at the age of only 37 – she couldn’t cope with a pneumonia because of her weakened body. Also the life of her sister Gabryela, who, born in 1894, became Marchesa di Serra Mantschedda when married to an Italian aristocrat, ended tragically, in 1924 (or 1926). Gabryela hanged herself in a Viennese hotel. Wikipedia claims it was after a row with her sister Maria. Their brother Edwin, aviator in the Russian Imperial Army, survived the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazis, and the sisters. In 1938 he emigrated from Germany to Ecuador where he died in 1966.
"Maria Orska was completely subordinate to the intoxication of the stage until it crushed her. Her strange appearance confirmed how difficult it is to understand the phenomenon of the stage actor. She seemed so enveloped in the air of the scene, but at the same time she remained so simple. She was a theatrical crowd-puller and a rhetorical star, such as Wilde’s Salome, and was also the most humble of Hedwig in Wildente [The Wild Duck] by Ibsen. She was hot and cold, she played and she lived ", Fritz Engel wrote. The famous artist Oskar Kokoschka drew the actress in 1922. Lithographies after his work hang in various museums, e.g. the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:
Vintage British postcard, 1910s. Hepworth Picture Player. Photo by Lallie Charles.
British actress Chrissie White (1895-1989) was one of the most famous and popular stars of British silent cinema.
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