1905-1959
Tall for her day, actress, opera performer and writer Jane Winton was born on this day in Philadelphia. Winton got her performance start with the famous Zegfeld Follies in the 1920's in New York. She made her film debut in 1924 in the bit part that went uncredited in the rather large production that was Ernst Lubitsch's Three Women in Hollywood. Her first credited role came the following year in Tomorrow's Love, a small production of a comedic melodrama. Her film career would last less than 15 years, but she did have appearances in some major films of the silent era. Due to her height (she was nearly 5' 6"--quite tall for the day), she was often tapped to fill roles requiring a "commanding" females presence, such as aristocrats and other high society types. One film in which she had a major role was a ground-breaker. Don Juan was the first Vitaphone sound system film to be released. Vitaphone was the first system in Hollywood to provide actual synchronized sound, in this case, sound effects (Don Juan was by no means the first film with sound by a long shot however). The films featured John Barrymore as the famous lover and Mary Astor as Adriana della Varnese; Winton occupied the role of Donna Isobel. The film was a release of Warner Bros. who were the one major studio doing the most to advance sound in film in the mid to late 1920's; they were also the studio that had Winton under contract at the time. And, she was quite a bankable actor for them; she for example took top billing, along with Monte Blue and Myrna Loy, in the Spanish-American War exploit film Across the Pacific in 1926. The studio also paired her up with Irene Rich in a couple of films, a casting that made sense given the height of both ladies. In 1927 and no longer working for Warner's, she made several films produced by different studios; they included The Monkey Talks (Fox Films), Perch of the Devil (Universal), Lonesome Ladies (First National), The Fair Co-Ed (Cosmopolitan/MGM), John Ford's "dramedy" Upstream (Fox) and Alan Crosland's The Beloved Rogue (Feature Productions/United Artists) starring John Barrymore and Conrad Veidt. Without a doubt the most famous film in which she appeared was also released in the 1927. F. W. Murnau's Sunrise remains to this day among the top ten most well known silents, despite that it was released in large cities as a partial silent using Fox's own Movietone system for sound effects and a full score (a first). The film shared the "Best Picture" "oscar" with William Wellman's Wings at the very first Academy Awards in 1929 (the first set of awards had two categories for Best Picture, and technically Wings is considered the very first film to win for Best Picture--it's hair-splitting really, if you ask me....let's call it a tie). It is also considered by many to be among the top ten best films ever made (not something that Wings enjoys now). Nonetheless, Winton was amongst the credited cast, with George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor in the lead. So that makes two films with ground breaking sound advances that Winton acted in. She went on to appear in twelve more films in the remainder of the decade, ten of them fully silent. Her first full talking film actually came in 1928 in Universal's Melody of Love, released in October and directed by Arch Heath (one of the few director's at the time that also directed all black casts). Her last film of the decade was also a Universal production with partial sound (talking sequences); a melodrama, Scandal featured Laura La Plante and Huntley Gordon in the lead roles. She made the transition to a full sound Hollywood with ease. Though she had a role in the Crosland directed mystery The Furies released in spring of 1930 (another lost feature), her first film appearance of the new decade came in the prologue of Edward F. Cline's morality melodrama In the Next Room, which was released in January. Her major film appearance of the last portion of her film career without a doubt came in Howard Hughes' epic Hell's Angels (November 1930). She left Hollywood after this, for whatever reason, and moved back to New York. I've read a lot about how her "star was fading," her "star faded quickly"--personally I don't see any evidence that she could not have continued to act in the same sort of supporting roles that she had been. My best guess is that she tired of those type of roles. She was possessed of other talents, and the fact that by 1933 she was singing high opera in New York tells me that she must have felt that was a perishable skill and if she wanted to pursue that in life, she had better go sooner rather than later for that goal. She did appear in some films after this date. Notable among these are two Warner Bros. short mysteries filmed at Warner's Eastern Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn (it was part of the "Vitagraph Inspector Carr series")--her appearances came in releases in 1931 and 1932. She also had an appearance in Hired Wife, released in March of 1934 and filmed entirely in Florida. Other than an appearance that she made in a little Al Christie film in 1935, she only made other film appearance in 1937 in Limelight (also known as Backstage)--a musical. The film was British and she had been in London during the time of it's filming performing opera. She made no additional films appearances after this, but she did eventually become a published novelist in 1951. Her second novel was published the following year. In addition to her artistic talents in writing, she was also a painter. Her life was cut short when she died suddenly (of what we still do not know) on the 22nd of September in 1959 at the age of 53. She is interred in her husband's family crypt in the Jewish cemetery in Hudson-on-Hastings: Temple Israel in New York state.
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