Constance Talmadge
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| Constance Talmadge | |
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 Constance Talmadge in the 1910s |
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| Born | Constance Alice Talmadge April 19, 1897 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | November 23, 1973 (aged 76) Los Angeles, California |
| Years active | 1914 - 1929 |
| Spouse(s) | John Pialoglou (1920-1922) Alastair MacIntosh (1926-1927) Townsend Metcher (1929-1931) Walter Michael Giblin (1939-1964) |
Constance Talmadge (April 19, 1897 - November 23, 1973) was a silent movie star born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and was the sister of fellow actresses Norma Talmadge and Natalie Talmadge.
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[edit] Career
Constance Talmadge, one of Hollywood's most popular comediennes, was a beautiful girl with a great sense of humor who gained the pinnacle of stardom despite inexperience. She achieved film immortality as the ‘Mountain Girl’ of ancient Babylon in David W. Griffith’s Intolerance. She made 84 films from 1914 to 1929, and when sound technology arrested the industry, had the courage to end her film career, turning down offers from the studios that profited from her efforts and walked away from their cameras forever.
Constance was born into a poor family. Her father, Fred Talmadge, was an alcoholic, and left them when she was still very young. Her mother, Peg, made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended that Peg use Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to try it. This led the girls from one step to another, eventually spring-boarding all three sisters to stardom. [1]
She began making films in 1914, in a Vitagraph comedy short, In Bridal Attire (1914). Constance's first major role was as The Mountain Girl and Marguerite de Valois in D.W. Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance (1916).
Griffith re-edited Intolerance repeatedly after its initial release, and even shot new scenes long after it was in distribution. Grace Kingsley found Constance in her dressing room at the Fine Arts Studio, in Los Angeles, in the midst of making up for some new shots.
“Did you really drive those galloping brutes of horses?” asked Miss Kingsley.
“Indeed I did,” stated Constance. “Two women sat behind me at the Auditorium the other night. They said, ‘Of course she never really drove those horses herself. Somebody doubled for her.’ Know what I did? I turned around and told them, ‘I wish I could show you my knees, all black and blue even yet from being cracked up against the dashboard of that chariot!”
So popular was her portrayal of the tomboyish “Mountain Girl”, Griffith released in 1919 the Babylonian sequence from Intolerance as a new, separate film called The Fall of Babylon. He refilmed her death scene to allow for a happy ending.
Her friend Anita Loos, who wrote many screenplays for her, appreciated her "humour and her irresponsible way of life" [1]. Pretty like her sisters, over the course of her career she appeared in more than eighty films, often in comedies, like A Pair of Silk Stockings (1918), Happiness a la Mode (1919), Romance and Arabella (1919), Wedding Bells (1921) and The Primitive Lover (1922).
She, along with her sisters, was heavily billed during her early career. By her Blue Book of the Screen bio, from 1923, Constance was "5'5" tall, 120 lbs, with blonde hair and brown eyes, was an outdoor girl who loved activities". [2]
When Constance was asked by a writer for Green Book Magazine what sort of stories she wanted to do in 1920 she said: “Although no less than sixty manuscripts are submitted to me every week, it is exceedingly difficult to get exactly the kind of comedy I especially want. I want comedies of manners, comedies that are funny because they delight one’s sense of what is ridiculously human in the way of little everyday commonplace foibles and frailties – subtle comedies, not comedies of the slap stick variety.”
“I enjoy making people laugh,” she explained. “Secondly, because this type of work comes easiest and most naturally to me, I am not a highly emotional type. My sister could cry real tears over two sofa cushions stuffed into a long dress and white lace cap, to look like a dead baby, and she would do it so convincingly that 900 persons out front would weep with her. That is real art, but my kind of talent would lead me to bounce that padded baby up and down on my knee with absurd grimaces that would make the same 900 roar with laughter.”
“You see, in my way, I take my work quite as seriously as my sister does hers – I would be just as in earnest about making the baby seem ridiculous as she would about making it seem real. I am not fitted to be a vamp type. There is nothing alluring, or exotic, or erotic, or neurotic about me. I could not pull the vamp stuff to save my life, but if I am assigned a vamp role in a comedy, and I had such a part in my fourth First National picture, In Search of a Sinner. I play it with all the seriousness and earnestness and sincerity with which a real vamp would play it, except that I, of course, over-emphasize all the characteristics of the vampire. I try to handle a comedy role much the same way that a cartoonist handles his pencils. If he is drawing the picture of the late Theodore Roosevelt, with a few strokes he emphasizes Teddy’s eye-glasses and teeth, leaving his ears and nostrils and the lines of his face barely suggestive. One must leave a great deal to the imagination on the screen, because in the span of one short hour we sometimes have to develop a character from girlhood to womanhood through three marriages and two divorces, and perhaps travel half way round the world besides; so, like the cartoonist, I try to emphasize the salient characteristics, which, of course, in my particular work, bring out the humorous side of the person I am portraying.”
With the advent of talkies around 1929, she left Hollywood, and by the early 1930s she was old news. Her sister Norma did make a handful of appearances in talking films, but for the most part the three sisters retired all together, investing wisely in real-estate and other business ventures. Only a few of her films survive today. [3]
[edit] Personal life
Like her sister Norma, Constance succumbed to substance abuse and alcohol problems later in life. She also suffered through many failed affairs and relationships. [4]
Constance Talmadge was married four times, but her early relationships rarely lasted more than a total of three years;
- Her first marriage, to John Pialoglou occurred in 1920 at a double wedding with Dorothy Gish and James Rennie. She divorced Pialoglou two years later.
- She then married Alastair McIntosh in February, 1926, divorcing in 1927.
- She married Townsend Metcher in May, 1929, divorcing in 1931.
- She married Walter Michael Giblon in 1939. This marriage lasted until his death on May 1st, 1964.
At the end of the silent era when Constance walked away from her stellar film career, she never looked back. Her career was a means to an end, and the end was security. Her mother fostered the belief she might one day return to films. “Success and fame cast a spell that can never been quite shaken off,” her mother pointed out in her autobiography. “A woman, because of her love, may say, and in the fervor of the moment believe, that she is ready to give up her chosen work. But there is sure to come a time when keen longing and strong regret for her lost career dominate over the more placid contentments of love and marriage. Then unhappiness and friction ensue.” Constance never gave films another thought, and she never regretted her decision.
Along with her sister, Norma, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, she inaugurated the tradition of placing her footprints in cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. Constance left a trail of five footprints in her slab.
Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 6300 Hollywood Blvd.
[edit] Notes
- ^ From Anita Loos's Biography on Il Cinema - Grande Storia Illustrata, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, Novara
[edit] References
- The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era by David W. Menefee. Connecticut: Praeger, 2004. ISBN 0-275-98259-9.
- The Griffith Actresses. By Anthony Slide. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1973.
- The Talmadge Sisters. By Margaret L. Talmadge. New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1924.
- The Quality You Need Most. By Constance Talmadge in Green Book Magazine, April, 1914.
