Talking Screen (Sep-Oct 1930)

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WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? Ramon Novarro left a flourishing financial exchange business in Mexico to teach piano and voice in Los Angeles and portray minor roles in pictures. If Lois Wilson had been a good school teacher — well, she'd still be teaching school. But she wasn't, and they fired her. However, they say she's done quite well since that time. By CHARLES REED JONES A LMOST any star or director of the talking screen can be induced, with very little urging inJL Jk. deed, to discuss his career for publication. And almost any one of them, too, will tell you that intensive preparation, hard work, study, and an unswerving will are the essential factors for a successful career in the studios. I doubt if the facts bear them out. There are many players, of course, like John Gilbert, Marilyn Miller, Lila Lee, and Rod La Rocque, who were carried behind the footlights before they were able to walk or who were pushed upon the stage in early childhood. But there seem to be many more who have been launched upon theatrical careers quite by accident. A hurried check of my long, long list reveals, for instance, erstwhile bricklayers, truck drivers, school teachers, telephone operators, stenographers, miners, and exponents of a dozen other alien, if not strange, callings. HERE, then, are the facts. What could have been the background of the great lovers of the talking screen You knew, of course, that Rudolph Valentino had been a farmer in Italy and a dancer in the United States before June John Gilbert made his first stage appearance when a young man of one. Later in life he sold automobile tires, and later still he came to Hollywood as a scenario writer and director in the silent days. It was music that brought Betty Compson mto pictures, for she was playing the violin in a small theatre when the movies lured her. She's had an occasion recently to niake use of this skill in a talkie. 24