Most actresses of the Edwardian era had relatively short careers. Competition for work was fierce and many young aspirants simply failed to ever rise above the chorus line, where their talents were only required for as long as they remained young and pretty. Many of those who did rise above the obscurity of the chorus line found rich husbands and had no need to carry on working for long, or made enough money in a few short years to retire and devote themselves to other pursuits. But for a few at least, acting was in their blood, they could no more give it up than give up their right arms, no matter how rich they became. These were the grand dames of the theater, whose talents blossomed as their age and experience grew.
The following are reproductions of two articles from period publications examining these special talents and attractions of an actress in the fullness of her years.
The Syracuse Herald, 25th June, 1911.
FORTY, THE REAL RIPE AGE OF WOMAN
YOU sit in your orchestra chair, or, mayhap, in the more distant gallery, and you gaze your fill at the beauty a Turk would romantically hide in a harem; you hearken to accents that would have made Caesar pliant to Cleopatra's wiles; and you marvel that, for all woman's fame as being the mimic sex, a girl so young can have elaborated a skill so mature.
Olga Nethersole
at 40
You train the glasses on her and, being that variety of idiot who looks gift horses in the mouth, you experience poignant regret to see under the perfect make-up on her face an expression that is peopled by memories of the thirties and only haunted by the delicate ghosts of her twenties and her teens.
And then, if you're a still further variety of idiot, you ask somebody after the show who has the reputation for being the-theatrical wiseacre, and he says she's 40 if she's a day; and you wend homeward your disillusioned way, wondering why the dickens we can't have young actresses now as we used to when you were 18 and fell in love with Lillian Russell.
The French know better - better than we, and far better than the Germans. They have given their artistic verdict that a woman is at her best at 40, and they have confirmed it legally with a verdict that she ought to be regarded then as her own equal, if not her superior, of half that number of years.
And the stage here as well as real life has just about come to the conclusion that the clear-headed French critics are right. As for the audiences, it's only a matter of taste; and the critics have remarked that the public taste is usually wrong.
IF A SUCCESSFUL, actress, under or over twoscore years, could by any possibility feel nervous over her professional standing, all of the leading ladies, here and abroad, ought to have been down on their adorable marrowbones for the last five years, praying that the judges of France might prove more chivalrous to beauty and talent in their utmost bloom than audiences in Germany. One woman in Paris was fighting alone the battle of her sex against the ungallant German view that an actress of 40 deserves cabbages and eggs instead of admiring applause.
She is Mme. Heglon. Five years ago she made a contract to appear in a series of performances in Germany. When she appeared the critics called her old. The audiences, who hedge critical opinion about with a halo of divinity which we are inclined to grin at, pelted her off the stage. The manager welshed on her contract. Indignant, she sued. All this time the case has dragged along, for they can drop a few years or so between objections and subpenas over there as well as we can, if they try. Mme. Heglon admitted that when her contract was signed she was 39 years old; but she contended that such an age was by no means a bar to appreciation of her skill, or even her beauty. In the eyes of intelligent spectators.
Actresses as famous as Sarah Bernhardt and Jane Hading, both now amply qualified to judge from experience, went on the witness stand, and gave it as their expert opinion that the actress who is 40 doesn't look more than 30 across the dissembling footlights; and they said that, by the time any genuine actress has reached that meridian of existence, she has attained to the height of her artistic powers. The court, when it finally did undertake to decide, indorsed the famous actresses' views unreservedly.
If that curious case had been tried here, Mme. Heglon could have summoned many more stars of the stage, not a few of them whose effulgence has been undimmed by more years than forty. But to be pretty nearly exact about the parallel, is there any one present who would think of rotten-egging, for age and general debility, that exquisite incarnation of youth whenever she chooses to look it - Mauds Adams.
Why, even those merciless Germans, who offered their criticisms in the crude form of cabbages, would be sending the S. P. C. C. around to the stage door to make sure she was of legal age to earn her own living if she were to appear again in "Peter Pan." Well Maude Adams is just the age Mme. Heglon was when Germany found her too old to be interesting.
Is Julia Marlowe too old, by this time? She's 41, for she was born In 1870. But let the fascinating Marlow choose to don the most girlish of characters, let her even essay Shakespeare's most ingenuous heroine roles and the best of lenses will fail to disillusion the entranced gaze.
It is true, however, that the most famous of actresses consent, often enough, to abdicate at twoscore years the throne of early youth. But that by no means signifies they are readsy for retirement. More often with the really able players, it marks the stage at which they ascend from mere cleverness and talent to the realm of accepted genius. It was so with the great Bernhardt herself; it may yet prove true of an actress with the fire and the daring of Olga Nethersole, who is 41 and has as fine a chance for the future before her as she has a record in the past behind her.
Maxine Elliot, at 33, is still the lauded beauty, admired as much for her physical charms as for her undoubted talent. But those who really know the stage would take odds that the moment she realizes her beauty may be waning will be the moment when she will feel the most vigorous spur to her artistic ambition. The death of her youth is liable to be the birth of her true genius.
But that appears to be the story of most feminine careers. However bright the promise of the earlier years, the coming of the forties makes the reality of character and intellect infinitely more imposing; and there is many a belle of 40, or near it, whose mere good looks are a richer asset to her then than they were when she was a girl.
Mrs. George Law has shone as a beauty and a social leader with middle age at her side. And Edith Wharton had fixed literature's most respectful attention with her "House of Mirth" when she was 43. A Helen Gould, wholly unostentatious as her life remains, achieves her full breadth of usefulness as she nears her forties. A Jane Addams, born in 1863, writes her first book, "Democracy and Social Ethics," and is revealed in her complete stature at the age of 42.
There are compensations when the sun is right overhead. In the middle of life's short day. But it is good to have them confirmed by a verdict, thinks Mme. Heglon; and so do her sisters, on the stage and off.
Atlanta Constitution, 17th October, 1915
"40 and a Bittock" Says Marie Tempest, Who Is Two-Score and a Wee Bit More. How Rosalind, the Heroine of Barrie's Newest Play, Is a Veritable Emancipator of Women, Blotting Out the Bugaboo of Middle Age in a Glamour of Physical Beauty and Mental Solace
By ANDREW WATRES FORD.
MARIE TEMPEST, most famous comedienne of the English-speaking stage says that woman's most beautiful age is "forty and a bittock." Forty and a whattock? you inquire. Because maybe you don't know that forty and a bittock, when translated from its native Scotch, means forty and a wee-bit more.
Back to the incubator, you clattering chickens of the early twenties who flaunt your unripe charms at every crossroads! why does a chicken cross the road, any how? She never crosses it, Marie Tempest answers, if the road leads into the dismal thirties. For the ideal of every woman is to enjoy "a long 29." To BE 40 — and to look "a long 29" — that should be every woman's ideal, according to the sparkling actress now playing the title part In J. M. Barrie's "Rosalind." In saying so, Miss Tempest merely emphasizes the text of the playwright who has given her perhaps the most charming role of her career. For Rosalind, latest of a long line of Barrie heroines, is a 40-plus actress, who has gone into the country to enjoy the luxury of being frankly middleaged during her vacation.
"'Middle-aged' How I dote on it. It's such a comfy, sloppy, pull-the-curtains, carpet-slipper sort of word. When I wake in the morning and am about to leap out of bed like the girl I once was I remembersuddenly, and I cry, 'Hurrah, I'm middleaged'".
She's Daughter and Mother.
So says Rosalind — otherwise Marie Tempest — in dressing gown and slippers to her rustic landlady. And then along comes Charles, a spark of 25 or so, who has loved Rosalind In London when he met her under the glamour of her offlcial age — just 23. The siren, caught in becoming negligee, tells Charles she is her own mother, keeps up the farce till he proposes to her for her daughter's hand, then called back to London by a telegram from her manager, disappears behind a screen for a few moments and emerges a dazzling, radiant, bewildering, altogether incredible vision — the woman who has been 23 for twenty years.
Of course the lover proposes with redoubled ardor, and she replies: "Charles, you shall woo me exquisitely. Nothing will come of it, but you will have a lovely time, and eventually you will marry the buxom daughter of the wealthy tallow chandler and bring your children to see me playing the queen in 'Hamlet.'"
"Forty is the most beautiful age for a woman," Miss Tempest explained the other day in her dressing-room, "because at 40 beauty is optional. A woman can take it or leave it. She can be bewildering or she can be comfortable. She has what you call here in America local option. Very young women have to be beautiful. There's nothing else for them. They don't dare to be anything else! Great beauties are made, not born. Beauty has its own technique which is not learned in an hour. The beauty of 40 can say of the girl of 20 as Whistler said when told that one of his pictures was just like nature — 'NATURE IS LOOKING UP.'
Flirting With Father Time.
"What wonderful understanding Barrie shows of women, don't you think? He sums up every woman's wish in Rosalind's glorious desire for 'a long 29.' If you remember, it goes this way: The actress is telling how all experienced dramatists keep middle age off the stage. 'Occasionally,' she says, 'one of the less experienced dramatists may write such a part — but — but with a little conning we can always get around him and make him say "She needn't be more than 29" — and so we have succeeded in keeping middle age off the stage. Why, even Father Time doesn't let on about us. He waits at the wings with a dark cloth as our dressers wait with dust sheets to fling over our pretty frocks - but we have a way with us that makes even Father Time reluctant to cast his cloak; perhaps it is the coquettish, imploring look we give him as we dodge - perhaps though he is an old fellow, he still can't resist the powder on our little noses, and so he says "The enchanting baggage, I'll give her another year." When you come to write my epitaph let it be in those delicious words — "she had a long twenty-nine."
Some Expert Opinion.
Miss Tempest is not alone among women, nor is the author of "Rosalind" unique among men in awarding the golden apple of beauty to the woman of 40. Otero, most beautiful and famous of Spanish dancers, once wrote an article in defense of the 40-year-old siren, who she claims is superior in every respect to younger beauties. Otero was at least 40 herself when she made this statement.
But, after all, what does that prove? On the other hand, Emma Calve, great singer and most celebrated of all the Carmens of grand opera, thinks that girls of 15 to 18 - who are lovely without being conscious of their loveliness — are fairest of all. Helleu, great French etcher of beautiful women, has declared himself as admiring most the vernal charms of 18. James Montgomery Flagg said recently that "woman's most beautiful age is midway between the bud and the rose jar — that is to say, about 25." Gutzon Borglum has declared gallantly that woman is loveliest "at every age." We all know that Ninon de L'Enclos, most celebrated of the historic beauties of France, was still breaking hearts when she died at the age of 90. And Cleopatra was way past her youth when Antony threw away the rulership of half the world for her love.
The French have always shown a marked preference for the grown-up woman as the subject of story, or play, or picture, or sculpture. When Yvette Guilbert visited the United States she sang a song of which the refrain was "Maidens Are Unripe Apricots" - a sentiment which expresses perfectly the Gallic view of the subject. The Latin races simply cannot understand the English preoccupation with the flapper of 16, the American admiration for the "broiler" and the "squab" who have not shed the pin feathers of the early twenties.
"What you call the broiler," said a visiting Frenchman last week as he watched the whirling figures at a New York dancing tea, "is the greatest mystery of American life. What does the American man see in her? She is hard. She is green. She is indigestible. She is a little reed bird which might do very well for one course of a great banquet where you have had soup and fish and know that the roast was coming afterward. But to marry a youngster is like dining off a reed bird when you know there is no second, more substantial course. Yet Americans do this con stantly. That, perhaps, is why you have so many divorces. If you WILL eat green apples, you know, you can't expect them to agree with you — unless of course you take them with a pinch of salt."
"Nonsense!" exclaimed a New York sculptor who had listened to the argument with great attention. "The American woman reaches her greatest physical beauty at the age of 20. My remark is based upon observation of hundreds of models who have posed for me. I find the fullest physical perfection in the American woman of 20 to 25. And the zenith is nearer 20. So we are perfectly justified in admiring the 'broiler.' Was it not Byron who, when asked if he could love a woman of 40, replied that he 'would rather have two of 20'? He was right. "If you are talking about beauty of soul or mind I might agree with you that the woman between 30 and 40 has an advantage over the youngster. But I deal in and I judge sheer physical beauty. According to that standard, the beauty of 40 is a cold storage product. There is no more comparison between her and the girl of 20 than there is between a canned peach and the luscious raw material half hidden by its own green leaves."
"But precisely," exclaimed the Frenchman, "that is all your young girl — call her broiler, squab, pippin, peach, what you like - that is all she is - raw material. She may with time and light and warmth and love grow into something very fine; or she may not. The woman of 40 is the finished product. All the science of life and the artistry of love have gone to make her what one of your poets calls the very pulse of the machine. That is what she is. Today they can be "forty and a bittock." J. M. Barrie says so. Marie Tempest says so. "Perhaps these two are the greatest of all the emancipators of women. Surely they are if they have lifted from her the dread of her youth, the terror of her middle age - the fatal fear of being "forty and a bittock."