Word: dressier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Best acting (female) Marie Dressier (Min and Bill...
Seven years ago, Marie Dressier (born Lelia Koerber) offered to play in vaudeville for $2,000 a week, could find no takers. She was ready to give up acting to try running a hotel in Paris when Director Allan Dwan offered her a job in Hollywood. The part that made her a cinema star, as she had been a stage star 25 years before,* came later-a bit in Anna Christie. Said Cinemactress Dressier: "They make you a star and then you starve. All I want is a small part to come in and upset the plot...
Reducing (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Critics who lament each slapstick comedy Marie Dressier makes as a deterioration of her art, wistfully recalling her work in Anna Christie and Let Us Be Gay, apparently forget that in the two latter plays Miss Dressier had bit-parts and that making a bit-part stand out is easy and not always justifiable. In Reducing, as in her other full-length roles, Miss Dressier works hard and with some skill, but the results are not memorable. She comes from the country as the permanent guest of her sister. Polly Moran, who has grown rich running...
...Bill (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This is better than most program pictures because it does not fit completely into any standard classifications. It is not a melodrama or a farce, but something between. Marie Dressier as proprietress of a boarding house on the wharfs, Wallace Beery as her star boarder and sweetheart, have some good lines. Sometimes they act competently and sometimes they burlesque with unconscious ludicrousness; particularly Miss Dressier who, made a star because of the extravagant praise given her for her work in bit-parts (TIME, July 28), has now kept on making bit-parts out of roles...
...Marie Dressier, 59, has been on the stage and in pictures for 44 years. She was a famed comedian 25 years ago. Mack Sennett took her to Hollywood in 1914 to play in Chaplin comedies. She was a hit in Tittle's Punctured Romance, but for several years after that played in weak parts and slowly lost her reputation. Used to earning $2,500 a week, she was glad to take $150 for bit parts. Last spring her acting as a gin-soaked derelict in Anna Christie with Greta Garbo brought her international fame in a few weeks. Abroad...