1895-1967
Comedy actress Alice Lake was born on this day in Brooklyn, New York. In her acting heyday, she was the star of Mack Sennett's shorts opposite Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. But before this, she was a dancer in New York and worked for a touring company. The little James Young comedy short The Picture Idol, a Vitagraph production from 1912, is listed as her film debut, despite that her appearance is unconfirmed at this time. She absolutely appears in How to Do It and Why; or, Cutey at College (another Vitagraph short), released in December of 1914. She stayed with the studio through the year 1915. After making one film with Thanhouser (The Fifth Ace), she signed with Keystone. Her first film with them was the Arbuckle directed farce The Moonshiners starring his nephew Al St. John released in May of 1916. She first starred with Arbuckle himself in her very next film The Waiter's Ball (1916). She would go on to appear in some the pair's most famous shorts after the addition to the studio of one Buster Keaton; including: Oh Doctor!, Coney Island, Out West, The Bell Boy and The Cook (a formerly lost film, rediscovered in 1999--well all but the last minute and a half). A goodly number of these films were filmed in the New York area; but by 1918, the operations had moved west and Arbuckle had started his own production company Comique, which Lake went to work for. Despite that in the late teens she occasionally made films with Mack Sennett productions, she stayed with Arbuckle's company until 1920. Her first major film outside this stable of comics came in the Rex Ingram film Shore Acres. She signed with Metro Pictures and became a bonafide movie star; taking first billing in a series of melodramas, many directed by Wesley Ruggles. By 1923, she had left Metro and made a series of films from multiple genres and various other production houses. Her star was also beginning to fade, and by the end of the year she had not only lost her top billing status, she was lucky to land major supporting roles. She was albe to regain a top billing status by the middle of the decade, but the films that she starred in were lower budget affairs by small independent production companies. And, finally, by the end of the decade, the number of roles that she landed were fewer and fewer. Her first appearance in a film with sound was the 1929 First National comedy Twin Beds -- a full talkie. Her last film of the decade was the Fox talkie Frozen Justice, a vehicle for Broadway super star Lenore Ulric. While she is listed in an uncredited bit part in Universal's 1930 romance Young Desire , her first major film of the new decade was Fox's "prison melodrama" Wicked (1931) where she is one of two actresses listed simply as "Prisoner" (the other is Lucille Williams). She appeared in just 11 more films after this, most of her these went uncredited. Her last credited role came in the Universal melodrama Glamour in 1934. The last film in which she actually appeared was in a tiny role in the Wallace Beery's 1934 turn as P. T. Barnum in 20th Century Fox's The Mighty Barnum; while the very last film that she worked on was Hollywood's take on itself in Paramount's Hollywood Boulevard in 1936--though her role was left on the cutting room floor. Defeated, she left the movie business for good, but remained in the Los Angeles area for the rest of her life. She died in poverty and forgotten on the 15th of November in 1967 of a heart attack at the age of 72. She is buried in an unmarked grave at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.
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