Beverly Bayne — Another Former Favorite Returns (1925) 🇺🇸

A talent that has been matured by years, of acting and by the mellowing experiences of life is now achieving a merited recognition, with Warner Brothers featuring Beverly Bayne in “The Age of Innocence” and other new productions.

Have the fans of yesterday forgotten the loveliness and sweet charm of the feminine half of the Bayne and Bushman [Francis X. Bushman] team, back in the Essanay days?

For a year or two the team left the movies, touring in a stage play. Upon their return, he to play Messala in Ben-Hur and Beverly to obtain what roles she could in the new Hollywood dramas — Mrs. Bayne found the way not altogether rose-strewn. New executives controlled the studio lots, and to the young stripling casting directors she was but a vague name. But she did not get bitter or resentful, but waited, and eventually her quiet charm won a chance to come back. If you doubt her right to the new place that she is winning, contrast the fine realities of her work, its skilled delineation of character, with what too often passes for acting among our younger generation. Back of every gesture lies meaning and the truth that life has taught her.

Beverly Bayne was a girl in the days of her Essanay triumph. To-day, still in her twenties, she is a woman made all the more lovely by maturity’s kind mark. The years have added character to her sweet face; few lines mar its serene calm; the brown eyes perhaps do not laugh as spontaneously at little things as they once did, but merriment dwells in them yet.

Her life is one of comparative seclusion. Her intimate friends are the Conrad Nagels [Conrad Nagel], Lois Wilson, and Leatrice Joy. Quiet home dinners and attendance upon the opera and concerts constitute her social life. She is one of the most earnest students enrolled in the opera class conducted by Doctor Nagel, Conrad’s father, at which the operas are discussed and explained and their arias sung.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1925