Screenland (Nov 1929-Apr 1930)

32 SCREENLAND What I've Learned from the Stage "I Knew if I Didn't Make Good, There Would Be No Re-Takes," Says Lovely Screen Star Now Trouping in Vaudeville By Esther Ralston MOVIE star yesterday. A 'hoofer1 today. Tomorrow what? That's the question Eve kept asking myself since two months ago when I started on my vaudeville tour. You'll be seeing me in my new picture, "The Mighty," which was the last one I made. After that film was finished I felt there was but one thing for me to do — to go on the stage. Here talkies have come along and introduced a new medium, a new technique — and most of all, new faces. If I wanted to hold my place on the screen, and I do want so intensely to hold it, I want it more than anything in life, I felt the thing for me to do was to go out and get some actual stage experience. So that the fans who made possible all these years of silent pictures might not be disappointed. So that I could try to live up to their highest hopes of mc. And believe it when I say, it's only these fans who have kept me going the last three months. For this has been the hardest, most searing experience in my life. Of course, I come from trouping parents. I was a child actress until I was fourteen years old. But I have been in pictures for eleven years. And I had forgotten — if I ever knew — just what the stage demands of a person. The world is filled with people who have difficult jobs. Taking in washing is hard. Working as a shop girl, standing on your feet all day, is no bed of roses. Digging ditches, scrubbing floors, sitting at a typewriter — they're tough, too. But of all the professions in the world, the Esther's dance, the 'Boardwalk,' captivates her vaude S h e is young, blonde, beautiful — the e pi to me of graceful charm.