Marion Leonard

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Marion Leonard, 1912

Marion Leonard (born June 9, 1881 in Cincinnati , Ohio ; died January 9, 1956 in Woodland Hills , California ) was an American actress , director , producer, and screenwriter during the silent era .

Career start

Marion Leonard, 1911

Marion Leonard began her career as a stage actress. In 1907 she first came into contact with the film industry when she briefly represented Gene Gauntier , the star of the Kalem Company . Her films from the time with Kalem are all lost and not even mentions have been made in filmographs . In 1908, at the age of 27, Leonard was signed to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company . Her first film for Biograph was, directed by Wallace McCutcheon Jr. (1884-1928) At the Crossroads of Life . The script was written by David W. Griffith , who also appeared as an actor.

DW Griffith soon became Biograph's principal director. Contrary to a myth that emerged later that Griffith preferred to work with amateur actors whom he could shape according to his wishes, Griffith employed actors with theater experience from the start. Within a year, Leonard received her first leading roles. John R. Cumpson , Charles Inslee , Arthur V. Johnson , Michael Sinnott (later known as Mack Sennett ), Harry Solter , Marion Leonard, former dancer Florence Lawrence, and Linda Arvidson were the main actor biographers. Florence Lawrence was the first actress to be referred to and marketed as a Biograph Girl - naming the actors in opening and closing credits and advertising with the names of the leading actors only became common later, and Biograph avoided any mention of their stars by name for a particularly long time . After Lawrence left, the company needed a new Biograph Girl . Mary Pickford is often named as this successor, but it was initially Marion Leonard. In 32 of the films that Leonard made for Biograph, the young Mary Pickford was also involved.

Marriage and move to Reliance Pictures and Universal Pictures

While working for the Biograph Company, Leonard met the screenwriter and director Stanner EV Taylor , and they married in 1909. At that time, the Independent Moving Pictures Company , Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford, was able to poach two of Biograph's biggest stars and thus show other film companies the way. In 1910, numerous biographers were poached by Reliance Pictures, a brand of the New York Motion Picture Company founded in 1909 by Adam Kessel and Charles O. Baumann . They included Leonard and Taylor, who after their time at Reliance Pictures went to Universal Pictures and also worked for other studios such as Vitagraph and their own production companies Gem Motion Picture Company and the Monopoly Film Company.

Own studios

Gem Motion Picture Company's engagement announcement to Marion Leonard, November 18, 1911

In 1910, Marion Leonard and Stanner EV Taylor founded their own film production company, the Gem Motion Picture Company. High-quality feature films were produced around Marion Leonard as the leading actress. The advertising was also aimed entirely at the star Leonard, and was extraordinarily innovative. In November 1911, for example, a full-page advertisement with a portrait of Leonard was published in an issue of the film magazine The Moving Picture World , set in a magnificent diamond ring, only with the signature MARION LEONARD ENGAGED . The game with the word engaged , which can mean "engaged" as well as "employed" or "engaged", was resumed in an advertisement that appeared later: Leonard confirmed her "engagement" (with Gem) in a printed letter. The great sensation that Sarah Bernhardt had caused the American audience - a few months earlier her film Camille (German: The Lady of the Camellias ) had come to the cinemas - was also exploited. An advertisement in Moving Picture World compared Bernhardt and Leonard: SARAH BERNHARDT is the foremost living female interpreter of human emotions on the stage today (...) the greatest interpreter of human emotions in the moving picture field is MARION LEONARD! (German: SARAH BERNHARDT is the leading actress of human emotions on today's stage (...) the greatest actress of human emotions in the film is MARION LEONARD! ).

The films produced by Gem consolidated the image of Leonard as an actress of strong women and brave and honorable heroines. In the first film, the civil war drama The Defender of the Name , she varied the theme of the spy behind enemy lines, which was popular at the time, by carrying out his brother's espionage mission after her brother's suicide, placing the result in the hands of the deceased, and thus saving the family honor . Due to difficulties with the distribution company, Gem was unable to bring one of its own productions into theaters. At the turn of the year 1911/1912, the company sold its films to the Rex Motion Picture Manufacturing Company and ceased business operations.

Monopoly Film Company's special train just before its departure for Hollywood , November 24, 1912

With the Monopol Film Company, Leonard and Taylor founded a new film company in 1912. In their commercials, they announced that Leonard 's $ 1,000 a week salary , based on a 42-week contract, was "perhaps" the highest salary ever paid to a film actress. It is unclear whether Leonard actually got this salary or whether it was just a publicity stunt of her own company. However, this was the first time that Leonard and Taylor used the level of salaries as an advertising statement, and they had their share in the development of the income of film stars up to astronomical heights. In doing so, they contributed to a development that was particularly feared by the representatives of the Biograph Company, a price competition between the studios. On November 24, 1912, a special train with the equipment of the Monopoly Film Company left New York for Hollywood . On board were twenty actors and other employees from the company that wanted to start filming in the open air before the studio facilities were built in the immediate vicinity of Universal Studios . The monthly production of two feature films with a length of 1,000 meters or more was planned.

With their film As in a Looking Glass , with Leonard as leading actress and producer and Taylor as director, both dared to renounce any inter-titles . At the time, the "realistic representation" was the declared goal of all filmmakers, and subtitles were seen as disruptive elements on the one hand, and were considered indispensable on the other. In mid-1913, The Seed of the Fathers, a film with Marion Leonard in six roles, was advertised as the first book adaptation of this length. A few months later, Monopol had to cease business operations as a result of the bankruptcy of a financier.

Withdrawal from the film business

Monopoly was followed by the short-lived Mar-Leon Corporation as the last production company of the couple Leonard and Taylor. Until 1915 she produced several films with Leonard as the leading actress and probably also as a producer. Then Marion Leonard withdrew from the film business and was almost forgotten by the public. In 1926, at the age of 45, she appeared again in Her Actor Friend , a Mack Sennett comedy film . Marion Leonard died seven years after Stanner EV Taylor on January 9, 1956 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills , California .

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Eileen Bowser : The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 (= History of the American cinema , Volume 2). Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City 1990, ISBN 0-684-18414-1 .

Web links

Commons : Marion Leonard  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Sarah Delahousse: Marion Leonard . In: Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall'Asta (Eds.): Women Film Pioneers Project . Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY 2013, September 27, 2013, accessed January 2, 2019.
  2. ↑ David Mayer : Stagestruck filmmaker. DW Griffith and the American theater . University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2009, ISBN 978-1-58729-790-8 , p. 97.
  3. ↑ Eileen Bowser : The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 , p. 110.
  4. ↑ Eileen Bowser: The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 , p. 79.
  5. ^ Richard Abel : GM Anderson: “Broncho Billy” among the Early “Picture Personalities” . In: Jennifer M. Bean (Ed.): Flickers of Desire. Movie Stars of the 1910s . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London 2011, ISBN 978-0-8135-5014-5 , pp. 22-42, here p. 34.
  6. ^ Advertisement by Sarah Bernhardt . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 11, No. 7, February 17, 1912, p. 645, digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dmovingpicturewor11newy~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D667~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D .
  7. ↑ Eileen Bowser: The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 , p. 119.
  8. ^ Marion Leonard Joins Monopoly Company . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 14, No. 10, December 7, 1912, p. 988, digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dmovinwor14chal~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D994~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D .
  9. ↑ Eileen Bowser: The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 , p. 110.
  10. ^ Anthony Slide : The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry . The Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland and London 2001, ISBN 0-8108-3426-X , p. 129 (Lemma Monopol Film Company ).
personal data
SURNAME Leonard, Marion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Cincinnati , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1956
Place of death Woodland Hills , California