Motion picture actors and actresses; Motion pictures
I saw these artists together a great deal during my visit there. In
fact they are inseparable.
A great many people have asked me if I think they will marry. Judging
the depths of a woman’s feelings and her intentions from the way she
acts, which of course, is not an easy thing to do, I believe Miss Negri
intends to marry Charlie.
While Chaplin does not admit he is in love, I have never seen a man so
devoted to a woman as he is to Pola. In fact I think she is the one
woman who has ever interested him completely. Stories are circulated
to the effect that Miss Negri announces her engagement to Chaplin in
the morning papers and Charlie denies it in the evening papers and vice
versa. I know these are not authenticated or authorized by either of
them, for they are both sincere.
Both are great artists, and therefore misunderstandings are bound to
happen. Whatever I am asked about the combination I say it is a great
one, but that there exists perhaps a little too much temperament.
At the present moment, however, Miss Negri’s career is occupying her
most vital thoughts. I believe that she, like every great artist, puts
her career before her personal desires, no matter how strong they
may be. She is working to establish her American reputation as she
established her European one, with a thoroughness and intensity coupled
with tireless energy and indefatigable attention that makes her an
extremist in everything.
I learned at the studio that if she has music to work with she will be
satisfied with nothing less than ceaseless playing of funeral dirges
throughout the entire day. She is known to make twice as many scenes
each day as is normally required. Her first day at Famous-Players
studio was a record breaker. She made thirty-nine scenes, whereas
twelve scenes are considered a good day’s work. She not only learns her
own rôle, but the rôles of all the others acting in the picture with
her.
She objects strongly to visitors being brought to the “set” where she
is working. It interferes with her mood, she declares, and she is
right. The making of moving-pictures is a business, just as the making
of steel, or the growing of flowers, or the sculping of a great statue,
and there is no reason for it being made a curiosity shop.
If she studies fashions, she studies them with this same indefatigable
zeal that marks her every effort. She has every fashion magazine
published in Europe and America, and pores over them for hours. She is
an incurable enthusiast in everything she does.
There is probably no other woman in pictures to-day who is endowed with
more of the basic elements required to make a great dramatic actress
than Pola Negri.
_Chapter Nineteen_
THE TWO TALMADGES
I accompanied Schenck to the Rivoli to see his fiancée on the screen,
and I was very forcibly struck with the beauty and talent of Miss Norma
Talmadge.
“Very lovely--very gifted,” was my verdict as we left the theatre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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