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Actorvicws
Oh, I wish I could score for you here the beat and cadence of Elsie Ferguson’s voice! Her words are cold, I find as I write them ; and they leave one as cold as do many of the words in “The Varying Shore.” It was her utterance of them that was warm, melodious, hypnotic — when her voice was like the G string of a Stradivarius.
I recall saying that she must be paying a handsome sum to act again behind a row of footlights, considering what the movies could afford to pay her and the stage couldn’t.
“Yes,” she assented, “and I’m also paying a handsome sum in an effort to make fewer and better pictures. I’ve cut my picture contract in half, making two or three pictures a season where I used to make six, or even eight.” And even these details of her business, her voice put forth with beauty and with a slow but never painful rhythm.
And I remember that we talked of being a lady — and of projecting one across a row of footlights, which is quite another thing. I told her a story of Henry James, wherein a famous London illustrator (doubtless Du Maurier was his prototype) was induced to send away his professional models and have sit for his pictures of society a real lady and gentleman, whose circumstances, but not appearances, were, as the saying is, reduced. “The artist could do nothing with these unfortunate gentlefolk,” I told Miss Ferguson, “so he hired back his professional models; and Henry James entitled the story, ironically enough, ‘The Real Thing.’ ”
“No, I’ve never read that Henry James story,” Miss Ferguson said, “but I can appreciate its point; and I can tell you something that may interest you: The next part I play shall not be a lady. She can be