Photoplay (Sep - Dec 1918)

The Daughter of the Powerful ?? By Julian Johnson WHEN you think of the photoplay as something peculiarly and exclusively American, don't forget that America itself is the greatest dish of international hash in history. Into the search for a new art we put Yankee ingenuity, Miss Breamer appeared with Charles Ray, in "The Family Skeleton." British persistence, the French sense of beauty, a little Ger man science, Middle West sticktoitiveness, Southern romance and a seasoning of Italian temperament. Making motion pictures is a highly international " craft, under an American trademark. Same in actresses, too. The old recipe says that every movie queen was born in Virginia or was educated in a convent. That's as silly as our papas' superstition that Mrs. Leslie Carter's red hair made her an actress. There's Sylvia Breamer, for instance: Miss Breamer has been the most successful new young lady of the year. She first came to notice more than a year ago, as the soft background behind hard Bill Hart. But it took 191 8 to make her known from Grand Rapids to Baton Rouge. That's the test. Any actors can be known East and West in the United States, for they're usually hired in New York and fired in Los Angeles, and spend the rest of the time travelling back and forth. North and South, however, the only thing they do with motion pictures is look at them, and if your lithograph gets so it doesn't need your name in Michigan and Louisiana, you have the answer: you're prominent. Miss Breamer holds, in all probability, the record for becoming best known in the least time. So, laying aside our usual concept of the Southern lass and the convent queen, we find in Sylvia Breamer a new human element, the child of a novel 71 Blackton's production, "Missing," made a star of her. environment, the inheritor of a tradition little heard of in the interpretative arts. For, Sylvia Breamer is an Australian, a daughter of the British navy, and the grandchild of an Italian woman. I hope she doesn't lose either of two qualities: her delightful un-Americanism, and her valiant attempt to be ultra-American. The result of these white and blue powder sizzling around together in the same girl is adorable. It's not so much words, as accent and manner. Close your eyes and listen to her conversation and you feel as though you were hopping dizzily from kangaroos to Kansas— and back to the kangaroos. We "lurked heavily" (her phrase) in the New York Claridge one evening not long ago to get some dope (her phrase) for this story. Miss Breamer is rather taller than you imagine from seeing her photoplays. Probably because her producers have had an eye for an ingenue's brevity in direct relation to her appeal, they have surrounded her with tall men. She is dark with that darkness which is creamy, but never tawny. Her mouth is full and very sensitive — an unusual combination. Her eyes are very dark. "I say!" — she turned rather suddenly— "did you ever hear of any good coming to a crowing hen or a sailor's daughter?" "Yes," I answered. "I was once acquainted with a crowing hen who made a grand fricassee, and I'll bet you're a sailor's daughter, or you wouldn't have asked such a question." "I am," she returned quite proudly. "I'm the daughter of His Brittanic Majesty's Ship 'Powerful.' At least, I'm the daughter of her captain. Further, my uncle was commander of the battle-cruiser A scene from "The Temple of Dusk!" a Hayakawa piece.