We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
It Happened to an Ingenue 189
who has stood before both the business and the unbusinesslike ends of William S. Hart's revolver.
Something less than five years ago Vola — whose last name was Smith then, just like Mary Pickford's — was going to school in Rochester, New York, where she had been born fifteen years before. Of course, in school there were theatricals, modified to exonerate the players from adverse criticism by the word ''amateur." Vola played the lead in one of these amateur theatricals, and after it a local critic told her that she was wonderful — remarkable — a born actress — and that she should go on the stage. Of course such a critic of school dramatics, considering that Vola was an unusually beautiful young girl, ran a terrible risk of being called a flirt instead of a connoisseur of acting; but, as things turned out, he is hailed as a critic of astonishing integrity and foresight. At any rate, Vola took him seriously. She had no means of breaking into stage acting, so she wrote to David W. Griffith, of whom she had heard as the producer of Biograph motion pictures, which were then the best and only productions being made. And — oh, yes! — Vola sent him some pictures of herself, which was an extremely wise thing to do. Mr. Griffith wrote back to her and told her to take the next train for New York, which she had scarcely dared hope he would do. But she did take the next train,
conventional even in stock photographs with animals and autos.