Anita King — All-Around Anita (1916)
Anita King, one of the most versatile girls of the films!
More and more the photoplay demands of those to whom it delivers regular pay envelopes that they shall risk themselves really, cry actual tears, laugh life-likely, do pranks naturally, faint without foozling, preside over a servanted dinner as one to the manor horn, pour tea like an English Violet, climb the same side of a bronc as a Montana cowgirl does, perpetrate a rarebit without strings, fly a monoplane. simulate the saturated state of Carry when they had to carry Carry to the ferry and the ferry carried Carry to the Shore because Carry couldn't carry any more (which sort of simulation without stimulation isn't always so droll), sing beside babyboy in the dreamy dusk, loop the loop in a roaring automobile, and be prepared for action whether one is asleep with fatigue or too fatigued to sleep.
If you see Miss King in a photoplay, racing an automobile, or nursing a wounded soldier, or editing a paper, or managing a mothers' meeting, or addressing a crowd of men, or sailing a boat, or cooking a meal, or fighting a timber wolf, or running an airship, or teaching school, there will he nothing "phoney" or faked about it. It will be the "sincere stuff," as the newspaper men say. Miss King not only can but has done all these things "off-stage."
How would you expect such a versatile young lady to look? Just irritatingly self-confident, disagreeably competent — a shirt-waist-and-skirt person with keen eyes and a cold, critical manner — wouldn't you? Instead of which, the young woman who met me at the door of her Hollywood bungalow looked as delightfully helpless, as charmingly useless (clad in a foolishly ruffled heliotrope afternoon gown) as any masculine heart could desire. Her voice has a slow, drawling note, and there's a softly humorous little glint in her eyes if you say anything that amuses her.
When she had made some lemonade, some very good lemonade. I was entirely convinced of her feminineness. No man ever makes lemonade.
She explained she was resting after the strenuousness of her last picture in which she is being starred by the Lasky Company with Victor Moore.
"Can you shoot a gun?" I demanded. "Well, yes. I've fooled 'round with a gun a little." "Run an airship?"
"Why, I've done it once or twice nothing to speak, of — just happened —." "Have you ever written?" "Oh, I was women's club editor of a Minneapolis paper once. But pray what has all this to do with my career as an actress?"' Now Miss King is a very good screen actress indeed. So she naturally wished to talk about her work. However, a versatile person, who can do anything from running an airship to running an incubator, who can draw pictures as well as act in them, who is a milliner as well as a mummer — isn't that a sure-enough alliteration? — is too interesting to be allowed to escape without explaining. About the gun. It was Carey King, her husband, now dead, who told me of that. A few years ago, at the beginning of the strife in Mexico, she was living on the outskirts of Mexico City. Some Mexican soldiers stopped at her house one day and asked for a drink of water. Her Mexican maid served them. One of them recognized the girl as a friend of the rival faction, and started to seize her. Miss King heard the girl's screams, and rushed to help her. There were no men of the family on the place — and Anita King got a bullet through her arm. The soldiers finally seized and shot the Mexican girl, but not until Miss King had made a valiant battle and risked her own life! Some spark of manhood must have remained in the Mexican leader, for he called his nun away, and left the brave girl alone. She managed to bind up the wounded arm, but fainted before the family came home.
And I think the bravest thing I ever knew a girl to do — since the feat called for no mere spurt of spirit but for steady courage, a dauntless will — was the thing she did last summer — driving across the country alone in an automobile. Accosted by Indians in Nevada, by tramps in the snowsheds of the Rockies, single-handed destroying a timber-wolf which attacked her on the edge of the big American desert, and most of all being at the mercy of the desert heat, of strange roads, of the storms of the Middle West and the dangers of the mountains.
"About writing, now?" one asks.
"Oh, I have the news sense," said Miss King. "I'm sure of that. And I love general assignments. But when the women's clubs began to fight, and my newspaper put me on that, I simply couldn't Get used to the temperature. No. I'd rather run my car off the edge of a precipice" — a "feature" actually accomplished by her in her late picture for the Lasky Company — "than to try to report a meeting of a women's club where die women are quarreling."
"Well, how about school teaching?" "No money, my dear. And while I loved the children, there's something about Friday afternoon piece-speaking that gets on my nerves. Besides, there are moments when nothing does Johnny any good except spanking, and confidentially I can't bear the thought of a lug husky woman like myself picking on an infant. I leave it for someone else."
"And driving an air-ship?"
"Glorious I Glorious! But if you will look about you. you will notice a terrible dearth of air-ship lines. It seems not at all like a steady occupation, and a steady occupation I must have."
The latest accomplishment of Miss King, and the one showing an entirely different angle of her nature, is the formulating of a plan for the protection of girls who have dreams of becoming motion picture actresses. This she accomplished in consultation with Judge Thomas White, of the Women's Court, in Los Angeles, and Police Chief Snively, and in furtherance of the plan Miss King has been appointed a City Mother, and each motion picture plant will also have its woman officer, who will look into the qualifications, the lives and actions of all girls applying for work.
Photo by: Albert Witzel (1879–1929)
Tired? Not at all, despite the evidence; but ready for a race or a little jaunt to 'Frisco.
The fraction of a second after making a 72-foot leap — not hurt, just stunned.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1916
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Anita King is not only a transcendental little actress but a transcontinental motorist. Recently she drove an automobile alone from Los Angeles to New York. Later, she appeared in "The Race," a film play founded on this trip.
She has played feature leads in many Lasky productions, such as "Anton the Terrible" and "The Heir to the Hoorah."
Miss King, in her early stage career, was associated with Lillian Russell and Richard Goldman.
She is five feet four inches, weighs one hundred and thirty pounds, and has auburn hair and hazel eyes.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1917