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Marie Dressler, 1869-1934
Born Ontario, Canada
With her remarkably expressive face and gift for comic timing, Marie Dressler delighted film audiences of the early 1930s while portraying larger-than-life female characters. Dressler began her long and difficult path to Hollywood success with several decades as a stage actor in repertory theater, vaudeville, and Broadway shows. A string of failed productions and lack of steady work left Dressler at a low ebb as she neared her sixtieth year. It was then that she suddenly rocketed to stardom in a series of talking pictures. In 1930 she stole the limelight from Greta Garbo in Anna Christie and won an Academy Award for the tragicomedy Min and Bill. This caricature depicts Dressler in another highly popular film, Dinner at Eight (1933), in which she played a faded actress facing destitution -- a role she had recently played, and escaped, in real life.
Joseph Grant, 1933 |