Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

Among Those Present 59 She Has Her Own Company Now REGISTER another success for Marilyn Mills and her little home-trained horses, Beverly, Star, and Babe! Picture-Play told in the June, 1925, issue how this enthusiastic, energetic, brown-eyed girl from Holland went to Hollywood with her parents several years ago, there to live. It told how she had traded an old buggy and harness, a goat, some chickens, and a few dollars for a little bay horse and had begun training it for pictures, and how she eventually had acquired two other intelligent little horses and added them to her school. It was a new way of "breaking into pictures." Marilyn, Beverly, S'tar, and Babe, all began boosting themselves. It would be hard to say which tried the hardest. They finally got a contract with the Ben Wilson Productions and made good. Their work attracted attention. Now, on their new stationery may be found the caption, Marilyn Mills Productions, Inc., Hollywood, California. Capital became interested in them, a company was formed, and arrangements made to produce six five-reel pictures at a valuation of something like twenty-five thousand dollars each. The first of these, "Tricks," has been completed. The second is on the way. A Real Aristocrat IN Belgium, as Madame Ysaye, she presided graciously over musical salons, poured tea, talked of art. Her life was serene, dignified., uneventful, in a setting of charm. In Hollywood, as Carrie Daumery, she learned to work and to fight, and with the courage to meet the tests of a new life, she learned to earn her livelihood in a medium new to her, in an environment strange and bewildering. Four years ago, her compact and quiet little world toppled about her ears, and this Belgian war widow, of the family of the famous, violinist, came to America with her son. His health had been shattered by that conflict which had also taken her worldly possessions. Faith was still hers, however, and she had belief in the new and magic land where anything was possible. She went to Hollywood and began the tedious round of the studios. She was rewarded when Rex Ingram gave her a small part. Ever since then, she has been playing duchesses and ladies-in-waiting and regal dowagers, giving to her work in films of royal background a distinction and a smoothness of performance born not of technique but of familiarity with the scenes pictured. Fortune also has favored her son. Entirely well, he is now with Ingram in Europe as technical director. The most important role as yet assigned to Carrie Daumery is that of the duchess in "Lady Windermere's Fan." Photo by Tanhugt Not a Smile in Fourteen Years i JULES MENDEL for fourteen years never missed a performance of one of the best-known burlesque shows in Los Angeles, and not once did he smile. This was at a time when Main Street was the theatrical Broadway and when some of the present widely known stars, such as Lewis Stone, Bill Desmond, and others, were playing in stock. Jules Mendel was the star comedian of his show, of the rough-cut, typical burlesque sort. He avoided facial expression so carefully at that time that now his one-way expression in Hal Roach comedies in "tough egg" and heavy characters is his funniest attribute. He can flick the ashes from a cigar with more expression than he puts into his face. Generally, he wears derbies, checked suits, and similar racetrack raiment. A typical product of the old Los Angeles theaters, his genuinely funny characterizations on the screen, made without "acting all over the place," are indicative of the old school. He has been with Roach two vears.