Anne Schaefer — The Girl with a Hundred Personalities (1916) 🇺🇸

Anne Schaefer, the Character Woman of the Vitagraph Co.

by Doris Schroeder

“Just a few steps across the yard.” The guardian of the portals was most obliging, but the ground between myself and the dressing-rooms was thick with dust — and the day was hot. So I was unprofessionally grouchy when I knocked on the door marked neatly, “Anne Schaefer.”

A modulated voice, with just a touch of sad sweetness in it, called “Enter.” And when I opened that door, I shut it at once on my grouch. Maybe it was the room itself that did it — it was such a sunny little place, with curtained window, cut flowers, and well-bound books; but I am more than half persuaded that it was the “Lady Anne” herself. For as she sat there, smiling a welcome, I fully realized why the shabby little old man just outside the studio gates had said, “Miss Schaefer? You mean our ‘Lady Anne’? Sure, she’s over there, and it’s myself is tellin’ you, Miss, it is ‘Saint Anne’ they should be callin’ her — yes!”

Her lap was full of envelope corners, each decorated with a canceled stamp, which she was carefully clipping off and placing in a large box, half full already. I explained the object of my visit, and begged her to continue her work as we talked. She consented to answer my questions, offered me some fruit, and returned to her tedious clipping. I was curious.

“Why do you collect those stamps?”

She smiled as she replied: “Not all women are so fortunate as we Americans. These apparently useless stamps may be the means of saving the life of some Chinese girl baby who will be bought from the parents that do not want her because she made the slight mistake of not being a boy, and she will be taken care of by the missions, which the sale of these stamps, in large quantities, helps to support. So my canceled stamps are worth a little, don’t you agree?”

I certainly did. And I was filled with admiration of her spirit. I had heard often of Anne Schaefer’s charities, and had known personally of people to whom she had been a saviour; but I was glad of this glimpse at the real meaning of Charity — patient labor to accomplish good, with no thought of selfish reward. However, tho I tried tactfully, “Lady Anne” would not be drawn into a discussion of her good works.

I noticed a book of “still pictures” and asked for a few of her favorite parts.

“My favorite parts?” she paused with a bewildered look in her restful eyes. “There are so many that I don’t know where to begin. The most recent was Martha in ‘The Woman’s Share,’ a character which I felt every moment of the time I was in it. Were they real tears I shed in ‘Bittersweet’? Yes, I lived every emotion. It was really my boy who was leaving me — my heart was aching with the realization that I hadn’t understood him until too late! Wearing? Yes, but I love it. There were the two Mareea the Half-Breed stories, Johanna the Barbarian, and Anne the Blacksmith — all very different — and The Pore Folks’ Boy. I hear of that yet, tho the little boy [Paul Willis] who played in it with me three years ago is a grown-up actor now.”

Miss Schaefer was born in St. Louis and educated at the Convent of Notre Dame in that city. She is an original member of the Western studio of the Vitagraph Company and came West with Rollin S. Sturgeon over four years ago. Much of the success of that organization is due to Miss Schaefer’s efforts and ability. Such pictures in the earlier days of the Western Vitagraph as How States Are Made, The Yellow Streak, The Craven, Anne of the Trails, At the Sign of the Lost Angel, were the firm foundation upon which the present studio record stands. Her stage career was long and successful, her engagement just previous to entering the pictures having been with the late Louis James.

“Lady Anne” is devoted to her family and is responsible for the introduction of her clever niece, Jane Novak [Transcriber’s Note: Jane’s sister, Eva Novak, also entered the film industry in 1917], into the pictures. It is very seldom that Miss Schaefer has a day free from studio work, but when that day comes, her active hands are never idle, and every week a big box of stamps leaves for far-off China, and in many places there are people a little happier because of messages of sympathy and understanding, written by a real woman from the depths of a loving heart; for “Lady Anne” never ignores any one’s appeal for advice or comfort, and in consequence her friends are legion. Her greatest ambition is to make the screen a strong power for good, and by doing her best and truest work, help bring home the lessons of life to those to whom the screen is the book of life.

She told me these things in the hour that we sat together, and she spoke of herself and her gentle, forceful life, happily but calmly, as tho they were all in the day’s work.

—

—

—

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1916