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Yesterday, I posted a list of my favorite silent era character actors. Today, it's actresses.
10. Miriam Cooper—"The Friendless One" in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, she was a Method actress before the Method, once staring so intently into a Klieg light during a close-up, her eyesight was permanently damaged.
9. Clarine Seymour—Griffith cast her as the "bad" girl against Lillian Gish's "good" one in True-Heart Susie, but she proved so much more interesting than the heroine, she subverted the whole story. She died a year later on the cusp of stardom.
8. Gladys Brockwell—memorable as a hooker with a heart of stone in 7th Heaven and a homeless women with a pivotal secret in Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
7. Zasu Pitts—her quavering, sing-song voice turned her into comic relief during the sound era, but she was the avaricious shrew in von Stroheim's Greed, the love interest in The Wedding March, and Mary Pickford's only friend in The Little Princess.
6. Olga Baclanova—remembered now as the evil seductress in Freaks, she was at her best in Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs and Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York.
5. Anita Page—a personal favorite, she was Joan Crawford's arch-nemesis, on-stage and off, in Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens.
4. Edna Purviance—Chaplin's go-to girl in nearly forty shorts and features.
3. Louise Brooks—in Germany, she was a star, but in Hollywood, she was strictly supporting. And if you've seen A Girl in Every Port, The Show Off and It's the Old Army Game, you know she was one of the best.
2. Musidora—her iconic portrayal of spy master Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade's classic serial Les Vampires made crime so appealing, French police temporarily halted production.
1. "The Girl" (Bebe Daniels / Mildred Davis / Jobyna Ralston)—There was always a girl in Harold Lloyd's comedies, almost always named simply "The Girl," but she was, in fact, played by three very different actresses: the spunky Bebe Daniels (1915-1919), the demure Mildred Davis (1919-1923) and the soulful Jobyna Ralston (1923-1927). Daniels went on to bigger and better things with Cecil B. DeMille, Davis married Lloyd in real life and retired, and Ralston, well, she played second fiddle to Clara Bow and a squadron of airplanes in the first Oscar-winning picture Wings. But as "the Girl," they were all just wonderful. (Click here to read Annette D’Agostino Lloyd's essay on "the Girl." And no, she's no relation to Harold.)
Tomorrow: Silent Supporting Players Who Were Better In The Sound Era
The other day, FlickChick noted in a comment that she'd hoped to see a mention of Miriam Cooper somewhere in my write-up of D.W. Griffith's epic masterpiece Intolerance, but alas, it was a short review and I was destined to disappoint her.
Like most silent performers whose careers didn't stretch into the sound era, Cooper is nearly forgotten today, with her reputation resting on the handful of surviving films, most made for Griffith. She was born in Baltimore in 1891 to affluent parents, but slid into poverty and then an orphanage after her father abandoned the family and her mother took ill.
Cooper made her film debut in the Griffith short The Duke's Plan, but really established herself in a series of short Civil War pictures made at Kalem Studios. "I was a stunt girl; I didn't do any acting."
Her first real picture with Griffith was Home, Sweet, Home, an early attempt to stitch four separate narratives together using a common theme (John Howard Payne's song "Home, Sweet, Home"). Cooper's role wasn't much—just a bit part in the second story as a woman who briefly catches Robert Harron's eye—but Griffith must have seen something because the following year he cast her as Mae Marsh's older sister in The Birth of a Nation.
In his book Silent Players, film historian Anthony Slide praised Cooper's acting as "modern" and "naturalistic."
"I think I must have been some sort of a natural actress," Cooper said later while cheerfully admitting to having no real formal technique or clear idea how to create the effect she wished to achieve.
"I couldn't cry to save my soul," she said of one scene played for Griffith. "He pulled a chair up [and said] 'Miss Cooper, I didn't want to tell you this, but your mother has just died.'" She cried buckets.
Cooper's best surviving performance was as "the Friendless One" in the Modern sequence of Intolerance. After murdering her philandering boyfriend, a slum gangster, Cooper played her grief and guilt so realistically, she bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. (In a later film, she permanently damaged her eyes by staring soulfully into a Klieg light.)
During the filming of Intolerance, Cooper and Raoul Walsh (who would later direct such films as White Heat and High Sierra) married—secretly, since Griffith was himself romantically interested in the actress. Not until after Walsh moved over to Fox studios did they make their marriage known.
Cooper made 100 movies in her career, but largely abandoned acting after her marriage, working only for her husband after they left Griffith. She made her last movie in 1923.
Cooper and Walsh had two children together but she divorced the chronically philandering director in 1925 and never remarried. She invested her movie money well, however, and lived comfortably until her death in 1976, touring the country as a golf enthusiast and playing well enough to sink holes-in-one in three different states—no doubt some sort of record among golfing ex-silent film actresses!
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