Chats with the Players — Myrtle Gonzalez, of the Vitagraph Company (1914) 🇺🇸
“Please remember to spell my last name with a ‘z’ twice,” said Miss Gonzalez (there, I did it the first time!), “because that is aristocratic Spanish; spelled with an ‘s,’ it is plebeian Mexican.” And there you have the Vitagraph Western juvenile leading lady on her touchy topic, for she’s a Southern Californian so far back that a pair of her ancestors were the first couple to be married in the old Mission of Los Angeles.
From these temperamental, fiery Latins, Miss Gonzalez loves to trace her own dramatic ability. She was a singer first, a professional church singer, but she longed for more responsive audiences, and so the stock companies of Los Angeles claimed her for a while. These were her only experiences on the unsilent stage; next came the Motion Pictures — but that was an evolution.
It was Paul de Longpre who, painting Miss Gonzalez’s face, discovered its varying expressions; then an artist photographer, alert for a new subject upon which to train his camera, discovered the piquant features of the girl, and to capture photographically their fleeting, elusive beauty became to him at one time an obsession and a distraction. It was he who suggested Motion Pictures as a profession to Miss Gonzalez, and now, successful as she is, she is grateful for this advice. She is versatile, too, for besides a talented throat (which, however, registers naught on the screen), she has some very gifted feet — two, to be exact — and with these same feet twinkling she can brave the rankest critic in dancing that ever sneered; any kind of dancing, too, tho, with the addition of castanets on her fingers, an onlooker might easily bethink himself in the Alhambra, with the sun of Spain warming things up just around the corner. She can handle any kind of a musical instrument, also, which even in the pictures has a convincing phase.
A year covers the time of Miss Myrtle Gonzalez’s Motion Picture experience, and in that time she has come to two positive conclusions — she wants to become an emotional leading lady and to remain a Vitagraph Westerner!
Mary H. O’Connor.
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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, March 1914