Gertrude Michael — Star Who Breaks the Rules (1937) 🇬🇧
By all the rules and regulations and statistics and traditions laid down by the movie know-alls, Gertrude Michael should never have been a star, for Gertrude's climb to stardom has been a truly unorthodox one.
No publicity or ballyhoo, no spectacular roles and no stunts. One minute the name meant nothing; a month or so later and it had become vaguely familiar; then it was well to the fore as one of the most promising of the new stars, only to slip back into vagueness again and then leap up brighter than ever.
They say a come-back is the real test of a star's popularity. Gertrude has had the bad luck to find herself through accident and illness in the position where she has had to stage two come-backs and, surprisingly, for even one come-back is difficult enough, Gertrude has achieved the impossible by staging them.
The Picturegoer Library Files are a fund of information and statistics. Search through those files and you will find, carefully sorted under its proper heading, a stack of material and information about even the most insignificant film player, but on the subject of Gertrude Michael, there is a surprising lack of details, because Gertrude is, and always has been, one of the least publicised of film celebrities.
The film people will tell you that talent alone cannot make a motion picture star; you have to have ballyhoo, grooming and publicity.
Miss Michael has had none of these, somehow or other; probably because of her striking personality and because we have come to look forward to her appearance with the assurance that we can depend on a good performance, she has gradually insinuated herself into the consciousness of the picturegoer and also, because of its gradualness, has left a more lasting impression than the star who has been skyrocketed to fame by blatant publicity tactics and has enabled her to stage both those comebacks we mentioned earlier in these notes.
In 1933 Gertrude Michael arrived in Hollywood, entirely unknown, and without the influence generally deemed so necessary for a screen career. She had something to offer Hollywood however, in the fact that hers was an entirely different type of beauty to the sweet-faced cuties who simpered on the screen.
Here was intelligence and statuesque type of attractiveness that was entirely different and new to the movie people, not the startling overpowering type of looks that bowl you over breathless by their very spectacularness, but a beauty that gradually becomes apparent, a sort of acquired taste, like certain music, that takes time to appreciate, but once having won that appreciation, lasts, while the more catchy and spectacular song hit has died and been forgotten these many moons.
Her first screen appearance was in the Paramount picture, "A Bedtime Story," with Maurice Chevalier, it was only a very small part, but it was a part and a portrayal that set picture patrons looking up their programme to see who this new girl was.
Paramount were not slow to realise they had something, and so she was signed up on a contract that was distinctly flattering to one so new to the business.
She found herself in great demand and picture followed picture in such rapid succession that she was almost on the verge of a breakdown, when, as it always does in the movies, "fate took a hand" and Gertrude, driving home from Arrowhead Springs, crashed her car in trying to avoid a lorry and escaped death by a miracle.
Actually those who witnessed the accident thought her dead and covered her poor battered blood-soaked face with a coat.
For forty minutes she lay in the roadside, supposedly dead, and then an ambulance arrived with a doctor who felt the feeble beating of her pulse and had her rushed off to hospital instead of the mortuary.
Well, accidents will happen and if, just at the start of a promising career, they lay you up with a broken leg, concussion and a badly scarred face, well that's just too bad and if you're away from the screen that long at such a critical time in your career, then you can't expect your fans to remain faithful and that's too bad, too!
But Gertrude fooled the doctors by staging a come-back, which was something of a miracle, but more miraculous still, she fooled the movie people too, by going right into a new film and starting just where she left off.
Her Sophie Lang series leapt into popularity that threatened to rival Bulldog Drummond or Charlie Chan, but Gertrude will tell you she never has felt the same affection for "Sophie" since they reformed her.
Last year she had gradually won her way to the front rank, with all the major companies bidding for her services, and then last year, en route to England, her second bit of bad luck happened and she was taken ill in New York.
Again she disappeared from the public gaze while she spent months recuperating and now at last she is over here in England to keep the contract with Associated British Pictures that, but for illness, would have been fulfilled last year.
Important Hollywood companies have offered Associated British big money to release her from that contract, because there are few leading ladies of Gertrude's calibre available in Hollywood, but A.B.P.'s shrewd production chief, Walter Mycroft, would have none of it and it she is worth all that much money to Hollywood, then she's worth that to Elstree also.
So Gertrude Michael or Sophie Lang as she is known to millions, is over here in London to start work on her first British film. This isn't her first visit because she made the trip when she was only seven.
She has an attractive soft Southern drawl and a terrifying frankness about everybody and everything. Hollywood has no illusions for her. She refuses to be impressed by the vastness and efficiency of its studios or of its high priests. She is not slow to praise its good points or attack its bad ones.
Come to think of it attack is hardly the word, rather we should have said smile at its bad points. She has a grand sense of humour that just doesn't appear to let her take anything too seriously and a directness that her enemies must find frightening in the extreme.
Probably the secret of her success is to be found in the fact that her beauty is not superficial, behind it is intelligence and a tremendous personality, combined with a lasting quality that few feminine stars possess.
Which probably accounts for the fact that even without endorsing patent skin foods or beauty preparations and though you don't see her picture on the front pages of the magazines, she has been able to defy film trade tradition and come to the forefront entirely on merit.
Gertrude Michael with Herbert Marshall in "Till We Meet Again."
NEXT WEEK
A new and brilliant personality has lately come skating on to the screen, in the person of the World's Ice-skating Champion, Sonja Henie.
That she has other claims to stardom besides her skill on skates is proved by an interview by Max Breen in next week's Picturegoer. Don't miss it!
Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, October 1937