Chats with the Players — Eleanor Caines, of the Lubin Company (1913) 🇺🇸

In the three and a half years that Eleanor Caines has been with the Lubins, she has played all sorts of leads — Western, boy parts, comedy, emotional — but she loves Shakespeare and Dickens. She has played the part of Oliver Twist on the regular stage, for this versatile little lady has been an actress since she was three years old, when she played her first engagement with Madame Eames [Emma Eames].

Born in Philadelphia, she was educated at the convent on Chestnut Hill, but at fourteen she was playing dramatic parts in a good stock company, then she played two years in Robert Emmett, and starred in the Searchlights of a Great City.

But she does not sigh for the regular stage now. She delights in her work, and talks of it with interesting vivacity. She has very expressive gray eyes and an abundance of light, fluffy hair that throws off all sorts of lights as her pretty head tilts and turns. And, speaking of her hair, there is an interesting story about it, for she actually sacrificed it all once, for the sake of a film that demanded a real hair-cut! It was actually clipped, close to her head.

“Oh, I knew it would grow again,” she said, nonchalantly, “and I did some lovely boy parts while it was short.”

The feats that this dainty lady does are quite astonishing. Two years ago she climbed a sixty-foot cliff, while the camera buzzed. In playing The Sheriff’s Capture — and, by the way, she wrote that photoplay herself — she and the man playing opposite were thrown from their horses. His nose was broken, and her arm. Looking at her pretty face, I was glad the accidents were not reversed.

“It didn’t spoil the picture, at all,” she said; “it made it all the better, more realistic, you see!”

One interesting thing that I learnt about Miss Caines is that she cannot swim, in spite of the fact that she frequently falls out of a boat into very deep water.

“It must take a lot of nerve to fall into the water when you can’t swim a stroke,” I ventured; “why don’t you learn?”

“I can’t learn; I’m afraid of the water,” she replied, and she seemed to mean it! Verily, there is no accounting for a woman’s mode of reasoning. But no one expects a woman to be consistent — and so fascinating a woman as Miss Caines doesn’t mean to be.

L. M.

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Collection: Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1913