Showing posts with label
The Girl With The Green Eyes (1916).
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Showing posts with label
The Girl With The Green Eyes (1916).
Show all posts
1882-1942
The absolute original "vamp" Katharine Kaelred was born on this day some where in England. She was primarily a stage actor and first played the role of "The Vampire" in a stage production of A Fool There Was six years before Theda Bara famously played the character in the Fox film version. She lived for a time in Australia before immigrating to the United States. She was active on Broadway at least thorugh the year of 1920. She, like so many stage actors during the 1910's, was persuaded to go into film acting, only to find the technology too limiting for lack of actual speaking roles. She was active in the industry for only around three years. Her motion picture debut came in Your Girl and Mine: A Woman Suffrage Play in 1914. Probably the best known of her film performances came next in The Winged Idol in 1915--it was her second film appearance and her first starring role. She subsequently appeared in two films in 1916 and a further two in 1917. One of these, The Girl with the Green Eyes (1916), was directed by the husband of director Alice Guy: Herbert Blaché. Yet another, House of Cards (1917), was written and directed by Guy herself. Kaelred then left off film acting until 1921, when she appeared in Mama's Affair, a romantic comedy produced by Constance Talmadge's production company and directed by Victor Fleming. When she retired from acting, she chose to stay in the New York City area for the rest of her life, dying there on the 26 of March in 1942 at the age of just 59. She is perhaps most famous for her portraits taken in the photographic medium by famed British early photographer Alexander Bassano, many of which hang in Britain's National Portrait Gallery. Public records from New York indicate that she was buried on the 28th of March, but I cannot locate information listing where. She was married to noted stage actor and director J. H. Benrimo. Below are a few examples of Bassano photographic portraits of her.
1879-1962
Born in Québec City, Canada, she was the daughter of a British Army officer stationed there. Watson is almost completely recognizable for her character acting in role of mothers and matrons in the talking era; but her career started much earlier. She became interested in acting at a very early age; being independent minded she had hopes of attending a dramatic arts school in New York City; a move that her military father completely disapproved of. Despite this, she left for New York anyway and did enroll in school there. She made her Broadway debut in 1902 in a production of Hearts Aflame. She went on to find roles in several Broadway productions over the next two years. Along the way, she worked in plays that starred early motion picture actors such as Robert Warwick and John Barrymore. Her stage career continued to grow over the years, culminating with an appearance in a silent short film in 1916 The Girl with the Green Eyes, a production of Popular Plays and Players, Inc. This was the extent of her film work in the silent era. She would not appear in film again until 1930 in an early Western Electric talkie, The Royal Family of Broadway, a New York based production partially directed by George Cukor. She chose instead to stay on the stage; and she stayed there until 1934. She started taking film roles in the few movies that were still being produced in the New York area and found herself with a whole new career on hands. By the end of 1934, she was making films in Hollywood. She would continue to act in films right up into the early 1950's, and then even moved on to a little television work, before retiring in 1954 and moving back to her beloved New York. Watson passed away there of a heart attack on 24 June 1962; she was 83 years of age. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, in Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester Co.
