Claire Whitney (1914) 🇺🇸
In answer to a question as to which she liked the better, the footlights or the studio, the popular young Solax star, Miss Claire Whitney, who has recently attracted attention by her artistic work under the master-hand of Mme. Alice Blaché, made this interesting statement.
“After see-sawing for nearly five years between the ‘Glory of the Footlights’ and the ‘Click of the Motion Picture Camera,’ the lure of the silent drama has won me and I am now and for evermore established in the motion picture field playing leading parts in all Solax and Blaché features, with whom I have been for the past six months.
When I was a little girl, I was quite a toe dancer and everybody conceded I had a great future; but the stage then held no charms for me; dolls were my whole interest in life. Years went by, school days came and passed and the time arrived when I had to ‘steer ‘the ‘boat’ myself, the golden spoon having been mislaid at my birth.
It seemed only natural to choose the stage; my dancing as a child having always remained dominant, so that now it seems like second nature to acquire the most difficult steps with only a few moments practice. Well, after the trials that all beginners experience, I received an engagement in a vaudeville act with Mr. Frank Sheridan. At the close of the season I went to the Biograph Company, more as a lark than anything else, and when the regular theatrical season began again. I was back with a musical stock company. But the picture germ had gotten in my system and commenced to multiply and I started to make comparisons between the night’s work at the theater and your evening off to do as you like in pictures; the worry of bad business in the theater with the regular weekly envelope of the pictures; the long parts, tedious rehearsals, and the thousand and one annoyances that you are heir to around the theater, against the pleasant environment of the studio and home. Then, again, no one could have closed their eyes to the magnitude the motion picture business was assuming and the inroads it was making upon the theater. Everywhere theaters were closing their doors, pictures taking the place of the players, and the silent actor having his clientele of admirers the same as the stage, only where the actor of the theater could play to but one audience a night, the picture artist was being seen in hundreds of theaters throughout the country by thousands. But, notwithstanding all this, after a season with Marion Leonard, a most enjoyable engagement, I thought the theater clamored for me, and again I trod the boards with Louise Galloway in her wonderful sketch, The Little ‘Mother’, with which I traveled to the Coast and back.
I refused a second season with the act and became associated with the Solax Company at Fort Lee, where I am very happy, having found my ‘forte’ and stage life is becoming dimmer and dimmer every day, to be looked back upon now as an experience to be talked of at home.”
Miss Whitney is a New York girl, having been born and raised in the city of skyscrapers.
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Collection: Moving Picture World, May 1914
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