Actress Marie Tempest (Part 1)

 

Marie Tempest was a bundle of contradictions. A dramatic actress, a comedienne, and a woman trying desperately to be taken seriously.

She toyed with reporter Cecil Chisholm while trying to make a point about women’s suffrage.

“You don’t suppose that the little feather-brained dolls are ever fascinating.” Tempest batted her eyes at the reporter. “There are women who shouldn’t have a vote, you know. There are far too many people with a vote already.” Of course, she didn’t say it, but implied men are calculated in this equation.

“And how would you choose your voters in Marie Tempest-land?”

“By examination, of course.” The starlet winked at him, explaining potential voters should be tested on history, politics, and other important issues of the day.

“Well, er . . . aren’t you thinking the impossible—a rational education?”

Tempest shook her head, implying she was done with the subject.

From there, the conversation turned to acting. Marie couldn’t understand young kids today. They just wanted to get on stage and be done with it. She felt rehearsal was more important than acting. It’s how you learn, grow, and develop your part. Unfortunately, too many of the young actresses she worked with dismissed rehearsing as unnecessary and a waste of time.

Marie laughed at the idea of becoming an overnight success. “A good comic singer is born, not made.” So, the preparation is “endless, calling for years of the closest study before even a slight success can be achieved.”

When reporter Eleanor Franklin asked Marie what it took to be successful, she gave the usual response of talent and hard work. Franklin agreed that was how it was done in England. However, in America, “it pays almost as well to be notorious as it does to be famous.”

Clothing was another thing young actresses didn’t understand. The young actresses Marie worked with just threw on the latest fashions and thought they were well-dressed. Not Marie.

The Province, a Vancouver, British Columbia paper, gushed about Marie’s fashion sense. Even “Eve would stare and gasp at her frocks.” After all, “It is easy enough to buy clothes, but it is not so easy to put them on.”

Marie left the secret unsaid, but the implication was clothes needed to be fitted just right—snug around the bosom, low on the hips, giving one the well put together look.

Reporter May Tinlee described Marie Tempest as “little and blonde-haired,” with that “I’m all together and can’t come apart look.”

Reviewers explained her acting as a “bundle of contradictions.” She could be a “tomboy,” one moment, a “coquette,” the next. Her “little grunts, groans, and grimaces,” were like “elves peeping out of fairyland,” and her laughter was like “babbling brooks.”

Marie’s expressions clued the audience in that something was about to happen. “A little ripple of waves run over her eyes or flick across the corner of her mouth like a flash of light on still water. The eyebrows go up and up, the eyes go in and in, the mouth goes out and out.”

May Tinlee interviewed Tempest for the Chicago Tribune in March 1910, and described her as nice, but wise. “When you come away,” she said, “you’re not exactly sure who’s done the interviewing, she or you.”

Marie told Tinlee she sang all the time, no matter where she was, and always had a piano in her room, so music came naturally to her. Music and comedy walked hand-in-hand in her career.

Another reporter said, her “eyes are her life and soul. When you think of Marie Tempest, you think of the incomparable eyes in which all the imps of humor and gnomes of mischief are always dancing.” A less kind critic said she had a “bewitching face of ugly features,” and her “tricky voice . . . makes one think of a thrush that has caught a cold.” He wasn’t the only one who questioned her looks or voice. The Illustrated American told readers Marie “wasn’t exactly pretty,” but her smile made up for any deficiencies in her looks.

Reporters were careful not to call Marie ugly. Instead, they explained she was “pretty in her own way.” The Pacific Bee told readers “That without being exactly pretty, she has all the charm that comes from health, youth, wit, and high spirits.”

They weren’t the reviews an actress cherished, but Marie never took the bait. She smiled and kept her mouth shut. When she was a kid, her mother never let her cry. She taught her to laugh off her troubles, so humor came naturally to her, as did laughing at herself and what others said about her. Acting is a tough business after all, and critics have a way of crawling under your skin—if you let them.