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52
SCREENLAND
Jos
Boy" !
And now he's one of your favorites, too ! Meet Douglass Montgomery, hero of "Little Women" and other fine films — and read some hitherto untold anecdotes concerning Katharine Hepburn
''Greetings.'" Here is Douglass as the sensitive young wooer of Josephine March. His fine playing of the role established him securely as an actor.
By
iWortimer Franklin
A FILM actor who is stage-struck?
,/\\ Or a stage actor who is film-struck? / ^ Whichever of these two interesting categories Douglass Montgomery may belong in, (and personally I suspect that he's a combination of both), he can certainly lay claim to being a few jumps ahead of the Hollywood he serves. For years the good-looking youth who played Laurie to Katharine Hepburn's Jo March has been doing what only recently became the fashion among our front-rank film performers.
Long before the Hayses, Landis, Hustons, Hepburns, et. al., ever thought of it, Douglass was scooting back and forth across the country, sharing his time between camera and footlights. In fact, his determination to burn his artistic candle at both ends of a continent has given rise to the accusation of neglecting the cinema for its elder sister in the arts. And that's why he now feels that Hollywood may have begun to suspect him of the cardinal sin of snootiness — a suspicion which, he assured me, is wholly unfounded.
"It's true I'm in love with the stage," he acknowledged
The magnetic Montgomery played many lyrical s-or.es in "Little Women" such as this, above, with Ka tharine Hepburn, whom he knew away back "when."
In his latest picture, "Eight Girls in a Boat," Douglass plays opposite a whole octet of pretty ladies, including Dorothy Wilson and Kay Johnson.
amid the quiet charm of his New York river-front apartment, "and I always have been. But my chief plans — or hopes, anyway — are for a permanent film career. As a matter of fact, that's where my ultimate ambitions he/'
A tall, well-set-up youth, this Montgomery, with a sensitive, alive face under a blond thatch that makes him look no more than his twenty-four years. He abounds in a nervous energy that keeps him almost constantly on the move and fills his speech with frequent vigorous, unexpected turns of thought and expression.
Douglass traces his early preference to the stage, by a paradoxical route, to the fact he was born in Los Angeles, practically on the doorstep of the burgeoning film industry. The infant actor and the infant art grew up hand-in-hand.
"When I was a kid," he pointed out, "movies were made chiefly out of doors. A couple of actors would get out in the middle of a street or a park or somebody's lawn and start mugging and wigwagging at each other, with a cameraman and sometimes a director in attendance. That was the art of the (Continued on page 68)