Blanche Sweet — Blue Book of the Screen (1923) 🇺🇸

The windy city, Chicago, claims all the honors for ushering into the world Blanche Sweet. Sweet is her family name and not an adopted stage name, as many are wont to believe. At the age of one and one-half years she entered the theatrical profession, being carried on as “the babe in arms” for a stock company in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Her school days were spent in Berkeley, California, at a private boarding school. Just as she was graduating, the film rush was sweeping the country, and from her early theatrical appearances she was in great demand. Her career before the footlights had been with Gertrude Hoffman as a dancer and then with Chauncey Olcott.

Her first part on the screen Was in “The Man With Three Wives,” and, as Miss Sweet explains, she was “one of the wives.” One of her earliest pictures under D. W. Griffith was “Judith of Bethulia,” which has been often mentioned as the starting point in the high tide of both careers. She also made “The Escape,” under the guidance of Griffith, and played in The Warrens of Virginia and “The Storm” for Lasky. She did “The Unpardonable Sin” as an independent release, and then went with Hampton, appearing in such pictures as “A Woman of Pleasure,” “Cressy,” “The Deadlier Sex,” “Cinderella Jane,” Simple Souls, “Girl in the Web,” “Help Wanted — Male,” “Her Unwilling Husband” and “That Girl Montana.”

Her one and only romance, which, culminated in May, 1922, in her marriage to Marshall Neilan, began when they were playing two-reelers together back in the old Biograph days. Some of their early successes together were “The House of Discord,” “Classmates” and “Men and Women.” Mr. Neilan was not always her leading man, but was sometimes the villain, as in “Classmates,” where Henry B. Walthall as a dashing West Point cadet walked off with the lady’s love, while Mickey tried to foil them at every turn. When Neilan went into the directorial end of picture making, Miss Sweet became his star. “The Unpardonable Sin” will be remembered as one of their greatest pictures under this arrangement.

Her next vehicle will be with Bert Lytell in “The Meanest Man in the World,” in which she returns to her appealing girlish type of characterization. Her first picture under her husband’s direction will be “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” in which she will create the title role.

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Blanche Sweet a return to the screen caused great rejoicing among film fans and members of the film colony. Here she appears in a scene from her first picture, with John Bowers.

Portrait by Alfred Cheney Johnson • Los Angeles

Collection: The Blue Book of the Screen (1923)