Chats with the Players — Bliss Milford, of the Kinetophote Company (1915) 🇺🇸

She is five foot four, Peter-Pannish, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and I am certain — sure (I would stake a dinner in Childs’ on it) — that she cries: “Oh, isn’t it the sweetest thing!” whenever she sees a baby.

She says she has been with Edison three years, and before that with “His Last Dollar,” “Clay of Missouri,” “The Candy Shop” — stop! I don’t believe it. I know that she was still playing with paper dolls then.

But, dear, dear! she will be ancient and severely intellectual, in spite of her looks. She had a volume of Balzac in one hand when I interviewed her, and her first words to me were:

“Don’t you think child labor the worst evil of the age?”

So I said at once I did, and we were friends.

“That sounds like a suffraget, but I’m a harmless one,” she reassured me. “I believe in lots of things, you know — New Thought, fresh air, the brotherhood of man, calisthenics, eugenics, motor-boating, golf, tennis, swimming — my record is 54 seconds, even — oh, yes, and Woodrow Wilson. You see, I ‘m quite a believer!”

She laughed cheerfully.” Optimism is my recipe for health. I’m sorry for tired-out people who take pride in losing their illusions. Why, I believe in fairies, don’t you?”

Did you ever hear Maude Adams, in Peter Pan, ask that question? Well, she sounded like Bliss Milford, to a T. It seems a pity the camera can’t photograph her voice, such a full, rich one it is. I knew, even before she told me, that she could sing and play, but, of course, I couldn’t guess that she wrote music, too.

“I suppose it’s my temperament that makes me play comedy,” she confided. “You ought to see me trying to be tragic in a serious piece! It makes a farce of it right away.” But, of course, I’d rather do smily parts, anyhow. There are plenty of things to make folks sad in the world as it is. ‘Grand Opera in Rubeville,’ ‘Sniffkin’s Widow’ and ‘The Drama in Hayville’ were my best parts. When I get time I study my parts before playing in them, but it isn’t always possible.

“Censorship? No! I believe in freedom of the screen as well as of the press, tho I think the studios should censor their own work carefully.” “You’re not an American-American, are you?” “North Dakota” — promptly — “but my father ‘n mother were Scotch and French, and I was brought up in Chicago; so I don’t know what you would call me.”

“I know!” I declared fervently; “I’d call you perfectly charm —”

“I certainly enjoy your magazine,” she remarked hastily, swerving the subject so sharply that it might be said to turn turtle. “It’s a sort of introduction of us actors to you public. The Greenroom Jottings are clever, and the Answer Man — well, he’s such a clever man that I think he must be a woman!”

I felt completely put in my place.

“Maybe you will give me some of your personal characteristics, Miss Milford?” The young lady smiled maliciously — no, mischievously. “Oh, for them I’ll have to refer you to —. He can tell you better than I,” she remarked.

(Deleted by the censor. If the war bureau can do this, why not we?)

Dorothy Donnell.

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1915