Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1923 - Feb 1924)

56 Anna with the Lid Off in 1916," she said, running a firm, white hand through her short, tousled hair where she lay curled up in one corner of the dressing-room stock day bed, "but I don't want to be put in a position where any one can pick and choose my parts for me. "That has scuttled many a fine actor. Sometimes I have several parts offered me at the same time, and then I can' choose the one that fits me the best." "Haven't you ever made any mistakes?" I asked. "One horrible one. But that is about all. I've played in a picture called 'Youth Triumphant' and I had no business in it. But that's that, and it's done now anyway." "You see, I'm not infallible. And I am a poor business woman," she deprecated, shrugging her shoulders a little more firmly into the cushions at her back. It is reported that she got fifteen hundred dollars a week for making "Ponjola." This is probably pretty close to the truth. Sihe may be a poor business woman, but "I hate injustice," she went on. I rather suspect that she would stand for very little injustice to Anna 0. Nilsson. "And I hate "flatterers and liars." That seemed to let interviewers out into the air of the great open spaces', and it cramped my stuff, as I was just about to do a little flattering myself. But you can't be insincere or camouflagy with Miss Nilsson. She hits from the shoulder, and she carries a charge of TNT in every verbal wallop. It is related that one feminine interviewer was told, at every other question she asked Miss Nilsson, that "It was none of her business." I asked Miss Nilsson if she really told" the poor lady that. "I prob'ly did," she replied unhesitatingly. "I do not remember the occasion, but it sounds like me — if she was asking things about my personal business — my husband and how we get along at home and things like that." Just then I got to wondering how her new hubby liked her shorn locks, but I didn't dare asik her. In shifting1 and sorting out the veritable barrage of personal experiences with which this disconcertingly plain-spoken young ■woman bombarded me, I light upon one sequence which seems to throw an illuminating light on her successful and lone-handed' career. It is the sequence of events which she herself terms her "bakery days." And I wish that more of our night-blooming stars, who have prematurely faded, might have tasted of Anna's bakery days! These are the kind of days from which great players are made. When the little Swedish girl first came to America, with some friends, to see what made the wheels go round over here, she had no idea how she was to make a living. All she knew was that she had had enough of her small Swedish village. So she shook down he-r long golden hair and went to posing as an artist's model. Meanwhile, she took up her abode in a Swedish boarding-house in a not very fashionable part of New York. "Some weeks I made only a dollar and a half," she said frankly. "The boarding-house people were awfully nice, and used to ask me in to dinner, but I was too proud or something and I didn't go. Sometimes they'd fool me and call upstairs: 'Oh, Anna, come down if you want to, and help with the dishes. When I'd get down they'd make me eat with them in the kitchen, and then I'd help with those dishes. "I always had to pay my way. "But just across the street was a little bakery shop, and over there I could get three rolls and a cup of coffee for five cents ! I lived on that bakery." Anna's era, I believe, begins just about a year ago. Since then she has planted her personality all over "Pink Gods," "Hearts Aflame," "Adam's Rib," "The Isle of Lost Ships," "The Rustle of Silk," "The Spoilers," "Youth Triumphant," "Thundering Dawn," and "Ponjola." She has educated herself. "I didn't get very far in school," she admitted, "but I have read about everything that was ever printed — except 'Main Street' and one other book I can't remember now." "How does it happen," I asked, "that your accent is so perfectly British, instead of having any trace of Sweden?" "The reason probably is that when any one is learning to discard their mother tongue, they are most careful in learning to speak the language they are taking up very correctly." Just as she had to have her playmates washed before she would play with them, and cut off her hair to play "Ponjola" instead of monkeying with a wig, so she was meticulous in learning our language right while she was about it. She doesn't slur over every other word, as some of us do. "Tell me," I said, with what I took to be a winning smile, as she stood leaning against the edge of the door and I was within running distance of the studio gate, "just why are you in pictures?" This is my "hopeless" question. I've fired it at every big star in the movies except Mary Pickford, and I didn't 'have to ask her — or Charlie Chaplin. Always, I had hoped -that just one of them would tell the truth. Listen to' Miss Nilsson's reply: "Oh, for the money, I guess." Just that. Nothing more. Not one word, Mahomet be praised, about art. But you and I know that Anna O. is an artist, even if she is afraid of not being frank enough ! yiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiw LIFE'S OLDEST FILM First Reel. A maiden longs through life to star, She vamps an aged Lochinvar, He prates of jewels — gowns — a car. Subtitle, Matrimony. Second Reel. But her hopes he soon dares mar, He worships Mammon from afar, His coffers he just won't unbar ; Subtitle, Parsimony. Third Reel. So Cupid's stock soon falls from par, The maiden weeps, the lawyers spar, Soon Hymen's gates arc rent ajar, Subtitle, Alimony !