When Marie Dressler won the academy award for best actress in 1931, she was the third consecutive Canadian-born actress to win the coveted statuette. She was 61. A large-framed, squared jawed woman, she had left her Cobourg, Ontario, home nearly 50 years earlier to become one of Hollywood’s most loved comic actresses. A year before her, Norma Shearer, born in Westmount, Quebec, won the same award as the star of The Divorcee, and in 1929, Toronto-born Mary Pickford won an Oscar for Coquette, the first talking picture she made.
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Two Canadian-born movie stars share the limelight in 1931. Marie Dressier, left, is honoured by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts as Best Actress of the Year and Norma Shearer, who had won the same award in 1930, presents her Canadian confrere with the most famous of all mantlepiece artifacts [©A.M.P.A.S®/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] |
Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1893 in a house where Toronto’s Hospital For Sick Children now stands. She and her mother Charlotte, three-year-old sister Lottie and a younger brother Jack were left impoverished on the death of her father in 1898. Charlotte, a one-time actress, became an active stage mother and, before she was six, Mary was playing six evenings and two matinees for $8 a week at Toronto’s Princess Theatre.
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As Mary Pickford, the Toronto-born actress would become known as "America's Sweetheart" but prominently showed her Canadian heritage by having a maple leaf insignia displayed in her bedroom at Pickfair. When her old home on University Avenue in Toronto was torn down to make way for the Hospital for Sick Children, she arranged to have 20 bricks sent to her as souvenirs [C.J. Humber Collection] |
Mary loved the stage. By 1901, she was well known in Toronto and a hit in many provincial small towns. Two years later, she played the lead of a little mother in a production that included her sister and brother. It also toured in the United States, and this led the family to settle in New York where young Mary made a point of meeting David Belasco, a prominent producer.
He suggested a name change. After she chose her paternal grandmother’s name of Pickford and he added Mary, he gave her a role in The Warrens of Virginia where she quickly established a reputation as a “very creative and highly imaginative little body.”
Mary also approached D.W. Griffiths who was experimenting with film production at New York's Biograph. At 17 she made her initial film appearance in Her First Biscuits. Other films followed and soon one critic wrote, "This delicious little comedy, They Would Elope, introduced again an ingenue whose work in Biograph pictures is attracting attention." In 1910, she went to Hollywood and a year later, she actually did elope with actor Owen Moore.
Mary alternated between
movies and stage for a few years, but by 1914 she was committed to films,
making seven that year, eight the next. In 1917, she signed a $10,000 a
week contract with certain controls including the selection of productions
and the roles she played.
She starred in Pollyanna
and Suds in 1920. That same year, she became a partner in United Artists
Studios with Chaplin, Griffiths, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whom she later
married. Anxious to change her image, she asked fans, through Photoplay
magazine, to suggest roles she should play. She was disappointed when they
proposed Cinderella, Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables.
As a result, she
made fewer movies in the 1920s. Despite an early belief that talkies would
be like “putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo,” Mary won an Oscar, only
the second Oscar ever presented to a female, for her role in the 1929 production
Coquette.
After two productions
were essentially failures, in 1933 Mary turned, not very successfully,
to producing. Her personal life was troubled. Her mother died in 1928,
brother Jack in 1932, and Lottie four years later, the same year she and
Fairbanks were divorced. She married actor Buddy Rogers the following year.
On a 1948 visit to
Toronto for the world premier of her production, Sleep my Love, she told
reporters that it “made her utterly sad to drive down University Avenue
and see her old home gone.”
Mary talked of returning
to the screen and was approached for Sunset Boulevard but wanted script
changes that director Billy Wilder refused to consider. Later, she tested
for Storm Centre but withdrew, saying that she wanted her comeback to be
in a technicolour film. She then retired from public life. One public appearance
occurred in 1965 when the Cinematheque Français in Paris screened
more than 50 of her films over a month-long period. On opening night she
asked in fluent French for a little understanding because “the films had
been made so long ago.” The audience gave more than that — they cheered
heartily — the last time Mary accepted any audience applause.
Too ill to attend
the ceremony for her honorary Oscar in 1977, she accepted it at her home,
the theatre audience witnessing on screen a woman, brittle with age, with
bright shiny eyes, and an ill-fitting blonde wig lying uneasily on her
head. She died two years later, her death certificate indicating she was
only 85 instead of the factual 87.
Norma Shearer’s career
also started in the silent movie era. Born in 1900 to a wealthy construction
owner, Norma showed promise as a pianist, and enjoyed a happy childhood
until her father’s business failed in her teenage years. Forced to live
in more humble circumstances, Norma played the piano in a sheet music store
before her ambitious mother decided to leave her husband and take Norma
and a younger sister to New York. A brother, Douglas, stayed behind.
Before the end of
1920, Norma, despite being just five feet two and with indifferent legs,
was modelling for a tire company as Miss Lotta Miles. She met the editor
of Photoplay magazine who admired her spunk. He introduced her to a number
of people. Soon she was being paid $5 a day as an extra in a two-reel film.
In 1923, she got
a Hollywood contract with MGM for $150 a week. There, she met 24-year-old
Irving Thalberg, considered the boy genius of MGM. Thalberg loaned her
to various studios to gain experience before making Pleasure Mad at MGM.
One of the cast later recalled her as “a little thing, but she did have
big ideas, a big ego, and even then, obviously a big talent.”
![Norma Shearer [National Film Archives]](images/315.jpg)
Born in Montreal, and a graduate of Westmount
High School, Norma Shearer became a popular Hollywood actress, winning
Best Actress in 1930 for her role as a liberated woman in The Divorcee.
This clip from The Divorcee shows her dancing with Theodore von Eltz. She
would receive five more nominations as Best Actress before she retired
from movies in 1942. Following the 1936 death of her MGM movie mogul husband,
Irving Thalberg, Shearer's movie appearances became more infrequent. She
might have captured more recognition as Best Actress had she not turned
down the roles of both Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind and Mrs. Miniver
Mary also
approached D.W. Griffiths who was experimenting with film production at
New York's Biograph. At 17 she made her initial film appearance in Her
First Biscuits. Other films followed and soon one critic wrote, "This delicious
little comedy, They would Elope, introduced again an ingenue whose work
in Biograph pictures is attracting attention." In 1910, she went to Hollywood
and a year later, she actually did elope with actor Owen Moore.
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| Will Rogers called Cobourg, Ontario-born Marie Dressler "... a sensational musical-comedy star." In 1931, she won tinseltown's premier award as Best Actress of the year. Her role as Min (right) in Min and Bill is captured in this clip with her opposite, Wallace Beery, who would win the Best Actor award the next year [National Film Archives] |
Soon she was starring in movies with such established stars as Adolphe Menjou, Lon Chaney, and Conrad Nagel. She married Thalberg in 1927, and he carefully guided her film career until his death from heart trouble in 1936. A perfectionist, she took voice lessons from several coaches before making her first talkie in 1929. Her haunting, well-pitched voice prompted another co-star, Basil Rathbone, to comment that her discipline and distinctive voice would have made her a fine stage actress.
In 1930, she made The Divorcee while pregnant, carefully hiding her figure behind tables, chairs, and drapes rather than take time off in case her fans might forget her. Her Oscar performance as best actress enhanced her studio-promoted title as “The First Lady of the Screen.”
In 1931, she was again nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to another Canadian-born actress, 61-year-old Marie Dressler.
Shearer continued to be a major film star throughout the 1930s, playing the leading roles in Noel Coward’s Private Lives with Robert Montgomery, Eugene O’Neil’s Strange Interlude with Clark Gable, and Smilin’ Through with Leslie Howard and Frederic March. “She had a wonderful sincerity and poise,” March recalled. He also co-starred with her in The Barretts of Wimpole Street while Howard played opposite her in the 1936 production of Romeo and Juliet.
In 1938 she performed in a lavish production of Marie Antoinette with Tyrone Power and John Barrymore to earn another Oscar nomination and was touted for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Fans, however, objected to her playing such a perverse role causing her to withdraw her name. She also refused the role of Mrs. Miniver, preferring instead to maintain a more youthful image. She made Escape with Robert Taylor, who, like most of her co-stars, found her charming but fussy about lighting and camera angles.
In 1942 she married Martin Arronge, a well-known promoter of Squaw Valley, and retired from the screen.
A multi-millionaire still holding considerable stock in MGM, she and her husband travelled extensively and enjoyed a quiet social life with close Hollywood friends before her health deteriorated in 1976.
Four years later she moved to the famous retirement hospital, The Motion Picture Country House and Lodge. By 1982 she was unable to recognize either her children or husband. A few months before her 83rd birthday America’s first lady of the screen died of bronchial pneumonia.
It was Norma Shearer who presented the best actress award to Marie Dressler in 1931. Having been nominated herself, she was gracious in defeat, describing Marie as “the grandest trouper of them all.”
Marie had first appeared on stage almost 50 years earlier at age 14 after she had left her Cobourg, Ontario, home with an older sister because she couldn’t tolerate her German father’s volatile temper and his inability to provide for her Canadian-born mother. Christened Leila Marie Koerber, she adopted the name of an aunt, got a job with a stock company, and later held chorus jobs with touring light opera companies. She played Katisha in The Mikado and for more than a year learned a new comic opera every week.
Marie reached New York in 1892, performing in The Robber of the Rhine. At the same time she sang in a Bowery beer hall and a music hall to help support her sister and brother-in-law Richard Ganthony, who later became a successful playwright. In 1893/94, she was Lillian Russell’s supporting actress in two productions before becoming a star as a music hall singer in The Lady Slavey. Numerous musicals followed for the remainder of the century and into the twentieth. She was a big hit in a successful 1907 vaudeville tour in London, England, titled Oh Mr. Belasco, but two other musicals in England failed and she returned to America in 1909.
A year later, she had her greatest stage success as Tillie Blobbs, making popular the song “Heaven will Protect the Working Girl.” This success led, in 1914, to her first movie with the Canadian-born producer Mack Sennett. Her co-star was Charlie Chaplin, making his first movie for Sennett. Over the next three years she made other Tillie movies without Chaplin.
Throughout World War I, Marie toured, at her own expense, to sell millions in Liberty Bonds and entertain troops. But, the flapper image of the 1920s was disastrous for her: it suited neither her brand of humour nor her age (she was now in her fifties). As a result, she was virtually out of work for several years until Frances Marion, a personal friend and screenwriter, learned of her plight and fought to have her play the part of the waterfront soak Marty in Eugene O’Neil’s Anna Christie featuring Greta Garbo.
Marie’s performance rivalled that of Garbo and led to a series of comedy hits with MGM studios including one with Jack Benny and another with Norma Shearer in 1930. In 1931, her Oscar performance was in Min and Bell when she teamed up with bulky comic actor Wallace Beery. A year later, she was again nominated for her role in Emma. She played Tug-Boat Annie with Beery in 1933, and this was followed by Dinner at Eight — a totally different role described as “splendid” by a New York Times critic.
By then, however, Marie was ill, and after one more film she died of cancer, leaving, as one reviewer wrote years later, “a void in the field of character acting that has never been filled.”
When they received their Oscars, Mary Pickford was at the height of her fame, Norma Shearer was near the beginning of a brilliant career (She went on to win five more academy award nominations during the 1930s and to be called “The First Lady of the Screen.”) and Dressler was nearing the end of a long career. Indeed, these three Oscar-winning actresses collectively provided countless hours of viewing pleasure in the early days of film.
