Claire Du Brey — Want-Ad Vampire (1919) 🇺🇸
“It pays to advertise” runs the slogan. It also pays to read the ads. Many a little want ad acorn has grown into a giant oak business. Now we’ll go on with the story.
About four years ago, in the days when Tom Ince’s (Thomas H. Ince) pictures were beginning to attract considerable attention and no little jealousy on the part of rivals, it was customary to advertise for women to play atmosphere in society “mobs” — women who had lots of good clothes. The ad usually said “society women.” Ince was making picture dramas then at Inceville and a few miles away was Santa Monica, one of Los Angeles’ prettiest beach suburbs. One day a young woman sat in her home in Santa Monica reading the want ads of a Los Angeles newspaper in the somewhat futile hope of acquiring a cook. An ad for “society women with good wardrobe” caught her eye and — (we’ll conserve a little space here)…
Well, our heroine liked it. Old Inceville was a wonderful place anyhow. But she didn’t last long as atmosphere because she had that indefinable quality that we call, for lack of a better phrase, screen personality. Billie Burke came out about that time to make her filmland debut and she chose Claire DuBrey [Claire Du Brey] from among a considerable crowd of “atmospheres” to play her companion in “Peggy.”
That was the beginning. It was only a bit but it was enough to indicate that although she had never had any stage training, Miss DuBrey was an actress.
But if she had any dreams of becoming another Mary Pickford, they were shattered by the dictum that she was just naturally cut out to be a vamp, so a vamp she was ordained. Except for a year and a half as leading woman in Harry Carey’s “westerns” at Universal City, Miss DuBrey has been a consistent heavy, vamping here and vamping there, stealing susceptible hubbies from trusting wives and weakling sweethearts from sweet li’l ingénues.
Perhaps Miss DuBrey’s best part in recent months was the vamp who vamped Dustin Farnum in “The Man in the Open.” Then she went over and played one with Henry Walthall [Henry B. Walthall] and now she’s with Olive Thomas in “The Spite Bride.”
When she’s not working, she hurls her five feet seven inches of one hundred and twenty-five pounds into the surf near her bungalow home on the beach; or steers her swift little roadster up and down all the roads in California. She prefers philosophy and science to Robert W. McVance or Harold Bell Merwin.
Miss DuBrey’s advice to movie-struck girls is “read the want ads — if you don’t see any for vamps, there will be plenty for other more useful vocations.”
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The girl with the smile wins, as you see at the left — but Claire’s unsmiling characterization — as revealed in the center— helped to put her on the glory road.
The scene above shows Miss DuBrey — left — with William Stowell and Dorothy Phillips in a Universal filmplay.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1919