Chats with the Players — Miss Muriel Ostriche, of the Éclair Company (1913) 🇺🇸
No wonder I hesitated. Surely this slip of a girl, in the homelike little sitting-room on West 144th Street, could not be the whimsical Feathertop, the debonair Robin Hood, the stately Christobel that I had ventured up into the wilds of Harlem to interview — probably a younger sister — but no!
“I really am sixteen whole years and half another,” she laughed, “and I haven’t played dolls for a long while.”
I can truthfully say that she does not show her advanced age. A trifle over five feet high — or low, a wee bit over a hundred pounds on charitable scales, with unruly, light brown hair that surely very recently grew up into a young-lady psyche on top of her small head from a fat ribbon-tied braid, and round, interested-in-life blue eyes — do you wonder that I failed to recognize Miss Muriel Ostriche, of the Éclair players, and late of Biograph, Powers and Pathé, creator of one hundred and fifty parts in her single year of Motion Picture work?
An amazing young lady, truly! But no!
“I really am just a very commonplace person,” confessed Miss Muriel, plaintively. “I haven’t the singlest bit of a remarkable thing to tell about myself. I’m not even a suffraget! And I’ve never been a popular actress in John Drew’s company, nor a beautiful chorus girl, nor on the stage at all, tho I adore the theater. I never was nearly killed in an auto accident, and never rescued a millionaire from drowning at Atlantic City — so you see I’m almost remarkably unremarkable!”
It is not polite to contradict a lady. The etiquet books all say so. However, I venture to differ with Miss Muriel on this point. One hundred-odd pounds of vital energy and enthusiasm is not commonplace. When she is not working every day, six days a week, she is playing just as energetically, dancing her slippers — number twos — to rags, entertaining her not-to-be-enumerated friends in merry parties in the wee-bit apartment, going to the theater, skating in the cold part of the calendar, rowing in the warm. She is fond of poetry and George Barr McCutcheon, automobiles, chocolate caramels, farming, and her work, and she is charmingly, satisfyingly, remarkably alive.
“Is life worth living?” I asked her. The big, round, blue eyes grew bigger, rounder, bluer.
“To me it is!” (Italics do not begin to express the way she said it.)
The little past life that Miss Muriel has lived so far has been in New York. She was educated here within sound of Broadway, and the skyscrapers, noise and bluster of the big city spell Home to her, altho she is fond of traveling.
“What do I like to do in the way of athletics? Oh, just swimming, walking, boating, automobiling, driving, baseball, gardening, farming, skating,” she smiled. “I’m interested in Christian Science and Theosophy — or would be if I had the time. My work is really my fad.
“Do I believe in the future of the photoplay? Indeed I do! I think it will more and more crowd out the regular drama. No, I don’t study my parts before rehearsal, but afterwards I do. I like to see the pictures after they’re finished. Mistakes do look awful in black and white, but they help.” As I was leaving, she called me back.
“Oh, by the way, they call me the Turkey-Trot Girl at the studio,” she laughed. “That’s a bit unusual. And I forgot to tell you how much I enjoyed The Motion Picture Story Magazine — but, dear me, that’s not unusual at all!”
D. D.
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Collection: Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1913