Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1930)

Troupers Marie She Just Laughs It Off! Albert SHE has been to Europe every year since she was twenty. As a girl she was the toast of Broadway and her most intimate friends were the Stuyvesant Fishes and others whose pictures decorated the newspaper society sections. When in Europe she is always lavishly entertained. She has played before all the crowned heads of the last generation. She has toured the United States over and over again. Newspapers have acclaimed her and critics have been inspired to journalistic sonnets. She is the author of an autobiography. She has known almost every celebrity of this era. Maybe you think that all this has made her blase, bored, dulled. Then you don't know your Marie Dressier, who finds life absorbing, fascinating and the best joke she's heard since the first one about the traveling salesman. Marie Dressier doesn't know her own age. Actually! When she was a very young girl on the stage she made herself older than she was. Later on she set the clock back. It all became frightfully confusing. She's somewhere in her late forties, at the age when most women are reviving their own thwarted hopes and ambitions through their grandchildren. But Marie is having the best time she ever had in her life. A LITTLE over a year and a half ago she decided to put the theater and the pictures ou t of her mind completely. She would retire and lead the simple life on the money she had made, but M-G-M begged her to do one more picture, "The Callahans and the Murphys." Since then she has appeared in a dozen films and there are three waiting for her just as soon as she finishes "The Swan." Of course you remember her in "The Hollywood Revue." "Life is the best joke I know," she said, "and the most amusing gesture of all. Whoever made the world was the greatest wit of all time. I have a perfectly grand time just living and keeping on living. Everything pleasant seems to L happen to me. Big things as well as small. The other day I was in a department store. A woman came up to me and said, 'I'm furious.' I waited for my cue and there didn't seem to be any. So she went on. 'You don't play in nearly enough pictures and I'm furious.' Wasn't that a divine gesture? "Nothing bores me. Absolutely nothing. Wait! I'll take that back. A tea! Oh, Lord, a tea, with a group of women smirking and smiling and looking at each other's clothes and Marie Dressier, above, in one of her more regal moments, when buffoonery is put away and she drapes herself with the famous Dressier pearls. The smaller picture shows the marvelously mad Marie we know best — as funny a comic as ever knocked a customer into the aisle talking behind each other's backs. There! That's the only thing in this world that bores and depresses me. This" — she flung out her hand toward the set — "this is marvelous. This is real fun. I love to be a small fish in a big pond. I love knowing that I'm a part of anything large and vital and intense." As she talked, men and women kept passing her chair to remind her of laughs she'd given them. Friends — she has enough of them to nominate her for president and she keeps them bound to her with laughter, wit and vivacity. The stars with whom she plays adore Marie Dressier. Marion Davies sent out an order, after they had finished "The Patsy" together, that not a single Dressier scene was to be cut out. Greta Garbo, a close friend of hers, protects her work in the same way. And Lillian Gish. And others, all the others with whom she works. If you get depressed because there are wrinkles just beginning to show around your eyes take a look at Marie. Sure, she has wrinkles. They got there from laughing. WHEN she is on the set, at a dinner party, or a member of an executive conference she is the center of attraction and the most sought after woman in the place. Everyone knows that. Marie's age doesn't matter. She might be twenty or a hundred. Anyhow, she doesn't bother about it, for life is a joke and you just can't get serious about it. 35