Marie Dressler: Q&A with Author Matthew Kennedy

Marie Dressler: Introduction

First of all, what made you decide to write a book on Marie Dressler, a performer who died in 1934?

Well, she does seem to be a member of the obscurati, doesn’t she? But once I started looking at her life, I was hooked.

In the early 1990s, some friends and I saw Dinner at Eight at the Crest Theater, an old movie palace in downtown Sacramento. Yes, we all agreed, Jean Harlow was hysterical and perfect, but we really fell in love with Marie Dressler as the faded actress Carlotta Vance. I had known of Marie for years, but this was the fist time I’d seen her with a theater audience, and the reactions were so strong.

Then for the next few years, I wrote nothing but film reviews, and a nagging question was lurking in the back of my head: Do I have a book in me? It was a question I didn’t dare say out loud for the longest time. Then somehow the idea of writing a book and Marie were combined, and I began to see her as a subject for a biography. When I did some preliminary research, and saw her name attached to legendary show business people like Lillian Russell, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer, that sealed the deal. Of course I didn’t know what I was in for, but I had to jump off that cliff and make a commitment. And once enough information was collected, the doubt went away and I was consumed by this amazing woman for four years.

Now, who was Marie Dressler? What kind of person and performer was she?

Marie was Canadian by birth, born in Cobourg, a lovely colonial town on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in 1868 (or 1869, depending on who or what you believe). She knew early on that she was large, awkward, and had the face of "a mud fence." Her salvation was in making people laugh. Nothing gave her more pleasure, though being a clown her entire life came at a cost. She also developed great fortitude. Her father was abusive, she and her sister and parents moved frequently, and they were often impoverished.

When she began performing in operettas and later in vaudeville, Marie developed the discipline necessary to survive the grueling demands of the stage. She had little formal education, was a good singer, and made her own clothes. Her private life was a bit of a mess. She was married briefly in the 1890s, and was later involved with a no-good bigamist who took her money. She was extremely generous and politically active, selling war bonds during World War I and later becoming a champion of women’s suffrage. She was a major force behind the creation of America’s first theatrical union, but she later took an anti-union stance in Hollywood. Such contradictions keep a biographer guessing.

Marie Dressler (left) and Ethel Barrymore (center) during the 1919 stage actors’ strike. More information at Actor’s Equity.

One of the great joys in writing this book was researching Marie’s early years. It was a fun challenge to reproduce the life of a traveling actress in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and overlay that with the major events of the day that impacted her life, including the Titanic and World War I. Her long stage career exists only in scrapbooks, programs, on microfilm, and historic pages of newspapers online. To assemble the whole story of her touring life and relationships with fabled names in American theater such as Lillian Russell, Weber & Fields, the Shuberts, Eddie Foy, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Anna Held, I had to visit the special collections of several libraries in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, New York, Washington, and LA.

There is a museum and archive with exhibits devoted to her in Cobourg, complete with an annual film festival. The good people of the Marie Dressler Foundation are keeping her memory alive. So writing this book introduced me to all sorts of wonderful and unexpected people and places. Slowly a picture emerged of who she was as a person, and I’ve tried to capture that in the book.

Everyone I interviewed who knew Marie, including actresses Maureen O’Sullivan, Anita Page, Joan Marsh, and Karen Morley, director Joseph Newman, and nurse Grace Annable, said very kind things about her. She was warm, professional, funny, and comforting. She had insecurities — about her looks and the social class of her family most apparently — but they didn’t seem to cloud people’s fondness of her.