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Upon arrival Anna Neagle was asked for "cheese cake." RKO President Schaefer greets Anna as production starts on "Nurse Edith Cavell." Anna knitted while she studied her script.
ME> it's symbolic of the closer union between the I United States and England — this interchange of players, ™ directors, technicians.
We are no competitor to Hollywood. We're just a small ally, trying to do in a little way what you do here in a big one. Big? It's colossal! (A few weeks here and you speak Hollywoodese like a native!)
Naturally, I realized there would be some differences in making pictures between the two places. But I hadn't the faintest idea what they were. I began getting a bit of an idea the day we landed in New York!
Herbert Wilcox, the producer-director, was bringing us to RKO to make "Nurse Edith Cavell" and all the way over I had been reading books about her. So, perhaps, I was in a slight fog, still lost in those early-war days, when the reporters came on the ship. "Okay, Miss Neagle," said a photographer, "now let's have a little cheese cake, please."
I blinked. Cheese cake? "I'll call the steward to see if we can get some," I said. How those men -laughed! "We don't want to eat it," they informed me. "Cheese cake means that
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we'd like you to sit on the rail, cross your knees, and turn on the glamour for a picture!"
Making a film in America, I could see, was going to be a little bewildering! I had visited here several times before with my father, who was a sea captain, and once I had come seeking work. There were no ship reporters on that occasion. There was only the stern end of the boat and the great throbbing of the engines and a rather frightened girl who had just received parental consent to go on the stage. ... I found a job in the chorus of "Wake Up And Dream." It seemed so wonderful to me I would have been content to dance on and on — but not so my companions. Every one of those chorines had astounding ambitions. One was studying at the Sargent School of Dramatics to be a second Bernhardt. Another had saved money for a college course so she could be a child psychologist. Suddenly, I was fired with ambition, too. That is what America did for me. The air here was charged with aliveness, get-ahead-ness. I went back to England and worked
Silver Screen