Word: dressier
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Born in Canada (like Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer), Lelia Koerber (Marie Dressier) grew up in Cobourg, Ontario where her father was a music teacher. At five she performed as Cupid in a church pageant, made her audience laugh by falling off a pedestal. At 14, under her stage name (borrowed from an aunt) she joined an itinerant stock opera troupe, finally got a chance to understudy Katisha in The Mikado for $8 a week. Eight years later, playing in the same theatre, she was getting $800 a week...
After six more years, she played there again, for $1,600. By this time, Marie Dressier had had time to get married-to a handsome ticket seller named Hopper, from whom she was later separated -and to become a celebrated comedienne. She had played with Lillian Russell in Giroflé Girofla, with Joe Weber in Higgledy-Piggeldy, with Sam Bernard in a burlesque of Romeo & Juliet, distinguished herself as Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey. After an unsuccessful engagement in London, she discovered a one-cylinder farce called Tillie's Night mare, played it in Manhattan for two years...
...save their money. When she made up her mind to start a hotel in Paris, her closest friend, a Manhattan astrologer named Nella Webb, persuaded her to wait, predicted that she would enjoy "seven fat years" beginning Jan. 17, 1927. On Jan. 17, Director Allan Dwan telephoned Marie Dressier, offered her a role in a picture he was about to make in Florida. Reluctantly-because she suspected that the producers who remembered her would think she was superannuated -Marie Dressier took the job. When her friend
When Marie Dressier writes for publication, her words are often more sentimental than spontaneous. The flavor of a character which is attractive because it has remained warm, vulgar, direct, somewhat unsophisticated but far from unwise is conveyed better in the extemporaneous Dressier aphorisms that Hollywood especially admires. "I ought to have had a dozen kids and made their clothes and done their washing. . . . I always felt sorry for beautiful women. . . . Keep working always. 'It brings luck. ... A lady may stand on her head in a perfectly decent self-respecting way. . . ." Said Marie Dressier when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered...
Died. Louise Closser Hale, 60, stage & cinema character actress, author of novels, short stories, travel memoirs; of heart failure following heat prostration; in Hollywood. Since her earliest successes in Candida (1903-04), Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1907-10), she, like her longtime friend Marie Dressier (see p. 23), usually portrayed old ladies. Unlike Marie Dressler's, her old ladies were usually gentle, whimsical, timid...