Alberta Vaughn — Mack Sennett Picks Another (1923) 🇺🇸

Thoroughbred horses, oratorical colonels, and beautiful women have all made Kentucky famous, but in the Hollywood him colony just now one forgets all that. When Kentucky is mentioned, every one thinks of Alberta Vaughn. She is the envoy extraordinary of the blue-grass region, and one of the most interesting possibilities in pictures.

by Doris Irving

She may be a second Betty Compson. She may emerge from her training on the Mack Sennett lot a worldly siren like Gloria Swanson or Mae Busch. Or she may reach the comic heights scaled only by Mabel Normand in the past. Any or all of these things seem possible for Alberta. Just a few bits in other pictures and then featured roles in five Sennett comedies and Alberta has already made such an  impression that people speak of her as one of the coming sure-fire hits.

She came into motion pictures by way of an advertising stunt. A firm that was going to make some motion pictures advertising their product sought the prettiest girl in Kentucky to play a part. A beauty contest was held and Alberta won it without much competition. But after the little local movie was made she settled down to her usual routine of school and athletics and parties. Alberta’s ambitions were a bit vague at this time and she didn’t think that she could go out and startle the world just because she had won a local beauty contest.

The Kentucky representative of a Western producing company was very much struck by her talent, however. He wrote out to his company about her and as they seemed interested he persuaded her and her mother and sister to go West.

Arrived on the Coast, she went to work for one of the Lasky companies. This was about two years ago. After working in a very few pictures she was made leading woman for Clyde Cook on the Fox lot. This may sound very glamorous — leading woman and all that — but it really didn’t mean much. There wasn’t much beside a few falls and a fadeout for a girl in one of these slapstick things.

Alberta might have gone along in a dull, plodding way as the beauty relief in comedies so frequently does, if Mack Sennett hadn’t seen her.

Now no one — unless it be Flo Ziegfeld — has a better reputation for picking beautiful girls than has Mack Sennett. So it is needless to remark that Alberta Vaughn is shapely, comely and young, that she fills a bathing suit as it ought to be filled and moves about gracefully. In addition to all this, she has a cunning way of insinuating herself into situations. Even her manners have a cooing Southern accent.

Alberta Vaughn passes with a high grade the bathing-suit test which is an important part of the Sennett curriculum.

Alberta Vaughn is young and dainty and pretty, as all Sennett sprites must be.  And she has a winsome, delicate charm all her own.

Photo by: Melbourne Spurr (1888–1964)

Copyright by Mack Sennett Comedies

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1923