Word: duse
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...Broadway actress as something in the nature of Elsie Dinsmore wearing tap shoes, this picture is an undertaking in which Warner Brothers generously exhibit the reverse of the medal, ornamented by the likeness of a stage lady of a different type. Joyce Heath (Bette Davis) is a minor-league Duse whose talents are impaired by a fondness for drink, lechery and offstage exhibitionism. She drives her husband to despair, causes a young architect (Franchot Tone) to jilt his fiancee (Margaret Lindsay), and wrecks his high-priced roadster on a tree. This produces a concussion and remorse, in which Joyce Heath...
...uncomfortable because people expected him to live up to his role as the offspring of the romance of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. They knew Lady Paget, friend of Queen Victoria, theosophist who made her own shoes and who predicted the World War and the Russian Revolution. They entertained Duse, who appeared with a genius in tow, a grim, self-assured, masculine-appearing girl who immediately began chasing her hostess all over the house and garden. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas appeared, as well as Gordon Craig and a host of others less eminent but no less vital, most...
...pointing out that one test of an actress' stature is her ability to seem superior to her roles. If this is true, Miss Bergner's performance in Escape Me Never goes far to justify the encomiums of critics who, after Catherine the Great, called her a cinematic Duse. In other respects, though it is a definite improvement on the wooden play written under the same title by Margaret Kennedy as a sequel to The Constant Nymph and performed by Elisabeth Bergner in London and Manhattan (TIME, Jan. 28). Escape Me Never is a cinematic mediocrity, which not even...
...harder than any other member of the company," said one account. "She is the first to arrive at the theatre, and she spends an hour on her make-up alone." Press releases had declared that the English now set her above Ellen Terry, the French compare her with Eleonora Duse...
Escape Me Never! That her first U. S. audience could not go quite so far as to drape over Elizabeth Bergner's slim shoulders the accumulated mantles of Terry, Duse & Bernhardt was no reflection on her very considerable talents. It does not take much of a play to provide a proper vehicle for an authentic diva. The less dramaturgy there is to distract attention from the star, many a leading lady feels, the better. But Playwright Kennedy's tale about the musical Sangers, a faintly connected sequel to her Constant Nymph, is practically no play at all. Every...