Clare Eames — A Player of Queens (1925) 🇺🇸
Clare Eames has a unique position. Both on the screen and on the stage she is nearly always cast as a queen.
It was her aunt, Emma Eames, the former prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera Company, who first sponsored Clare Eames’ career as an actress. As a young girl in her teens, Clare came to New York from the Middle West. She enrolled as a pupil at the Sargent School, and she and her sister lived at a little uptown hotel. Their aunt, seeing with gratification that the two were maintaining with dignity the artistic and histrionic traditions of the family, encouraged them.
After leaving the Sargent School, young Miss Eames made her début at the Greenwich Village Theater in a series of short plays. It was at once noticeable, slight though the parts were, that she had a distinct personality of an unusual order. She was far from beautiful — she had no particular charm. Quite the contrary. She was tall, angular, with good features but unprepossessing. But she had poise, remarkable for a beginner, and a sort of cold and haughty detachment and reserve which was arresting.
Ethel Barrymore gave her a chance on Broadway in Déclassé. Again there was that strange quality — aloof and yet imperious. From that time it was inevitable that sooner or later she would be cast as a queen. It started with The Prince and the Pauper. Her magnificent performance of Queen Elisabeth was the outstanding feature of the show. The critics were rhapsodic.
That determined her future. As she had proved such a splendid Queen Elisabeth some one thought that the performance of Drinkwater’s Mary Stuart would be incomplete without her in the title rôle. It can be readily understood that Mary’s volatile qualities weren’t quite the outstanding” characteristics of the stately Miss Eames’ performance. But still she was the queen to the “T.”
After that, Sidney Howard provided her with another regal rôle in Swords, which, however, didn’t last very long.
Of course with a queen like that running around loose, it was only a matter of time before Miss Eames was induced to give a celluloid version of her aristocratic qualities. Once more she reenacted Queen Elisabeth — but for the screen — in Mary Pickford’s version of Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. It was a startling, thrilling piece of work.
When “The Swan” was bought by Famous Players to be adopted as a picture, once more they began casting” about for a queen — and, in the natural course of events, Miss Eames transferred her make-up box from Broadway to the Long Island studio.
Not so long ago Sidney Howard, the distinguished playwright, decided that as far as queens go Miss Eames is his idea of everything a consort should be, so in private life Clare Eames is Mrs. Sidney Howard.
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1925