Word: dressier
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Cinemas in which Marie Dressier plays the lead have one quality in common-the heroine is a raffish, vigorous old woman whose generous heart thumps under sleazy clothes that do not fit her. Tugboat Annie (MGM) is not merely a typical Marie Dressier picture; it crowns all her previous works because its heroine is even more raffish, kindly, troubled, brave and energetic than the heroines of Min and Bill, Emma, Politics or Prosperity. She is Annie Brennan, whose three excitements are her mischievously drunken husband Terry (Wallace Beery), her handsome, respectable son Alec (Robert Young) and her dilapidated tugboat...
...competent direction. It is entirely because of the presence in its cast of an old lady whose preposterous career makes the happy ending in Tugboat Annie seem comparatively realistic and whose flamboyant character makes the people she impersonates seem pallid reflections of herself. Seven years ago Marie Dressier was an impoverished "bit part" actress, nervously consulting astrologers as to the advisability of opening a Paris hotel in the hope that friends who remembered when she was a famed stage comedienne might patronize it enough to keep her comfortable. Now, at 63, she is indisputably the most valuable performer in Hollywood...
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...
...achieve the ends which he now so skilfully contemns. After a polite upbringing in Boston, he started out at Harvard in 1912, left to study music at the Paris Conservatoire. After composing a symphony of which he says "It was terrible. . . . Have you got an aspirin?" he met Marie Dressier at a party, regaled her with his musical arrangement of President & Mrs. Harding receiving the children for the annual eggroll on the White House lawn at Easter. Marie Dressier put him on a benefit performance bill. Presently he was appearing at the Bat Club in London where Tallulah Bankhead...