Betty Blythe — The Family Name Is Blythe (1918) 🇺🇸
“I came to New York with one hundred dollars in my purse, a heart full of ambition and fire in my eye. It didn’t take me long to find out that only one of the three things were of any real help. The money and fiery eyes could have been left at home for all the real assistance they were to me.”
Thus Betty Blythe tersely explains her rapid rise as a screen star. With all deference to her modesty, we must remind her that it takes more than a “heart full of ambition” to spring into success as she has. One needs an abundance of courage, perseverance and above everything common sense enough to realize that you do not need it all. Added to this, an unusual screen personality and versatile talent and her success is accounted for in more detail. Even this is only half: to understand it fully, you must see Miss Blythe yourself.
When she landed in New York from the convent, she was so awed by the crowds that she would not leave her hotel for three days. As soon as she gathered courage enough to look for a job, she found one at once as “Slander” in George Hobart’s morality drama Experience.
It was her work in this play that brought her to the attention of the Vitagraph Company. She was cast as a sweet young thing in “A Game With Fate” and a heartless cruel butterfly in “Tangled Lives” and, while the rôles were not leads, she made them so distinctive that she was instantly recognized as a “find.” But it was in “Over the Top” that Betty Blythe really became universally known to film fans. Her work as “Madame Arnot” in this production stood out so vividly that she was at once established as a star.
All this, however, she considers only the beginning. The longer she stays in the work, the more she feels that there is to learn. This insatiable desire for knowledge with the determination to stop at nothing short of perfection, is the most promising characteristic about this most promising of the newer stars. Not to forget the “heart full of ambition.”
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Betty Blythe’s determination to stop at nothing short of perfection is the most promising characteristic of the convent-bred girl who scored a hit in Empey’s screen version of “Over the Top.”
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, September 1918
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Collection: Screenland Magazine, February 1924