Doris Kenyon — A Woman Apart (1925) 🇬🇧
As the sedan chair containing Lady Mary Carlisle glided upon the screen in “Monsieur Beaucaire,” and the door opened to reveal her, there was a sudden rustling of programmes in the audience and a subdued murmur of questioning.
by E. R. Thompson.
“Who is she?” asked a man without a programme.
“Doris Kenyon,” said his neighbour.
“Never seen her,” said the first man.
“Your loss,” said the second, briefly, and added, after a pause, “Loveliest thing on the screen.”
Yes, the description is not such a bad one when all is said and done, but it is only a beginning. Lovely, very, with her grey eyes and dark hair and apple blossom colouring, quite one of the loveliest girls in filmdom. But Doris Kenyon is much more than that. Her looks are not the key to her peculiar charm. Indeed, I wonder very much whether anyone yet has found the key, and if anyone ever will. It certainly does not lie in beauty of eyes or form or hair.
Doris Kenyon, of all the heroines of the screen, is one of the most tantalising. She falls into no special class. She is quite individual, a woman apart. You cannot judge her by any of the accepted standards of talent and charm; you are clever if you can coldly judge her at all. She seems to have given us all of herself, but when we analyse it, she has given us nothing. She is an everlasting mystery.
And the curious part of it all is that Doris Kenyon has expressed herself in every one of the arts, translated her spirit through speech and line and movement to waiting thousands; she has never hidden herself away or denied herself to the public she has elected to serve, but through it all the real woman remains unknown, a mystery.
She appears to have thrown all her cards on the table, but in her own hand she holds the trump.
A baffling, intriguing creature, with those flying eyes that do so much heart-damage — eyes like Priscilla Dean’s, but a spirit of ice where Priscilla’s is flame. A princess in a fairy tale, a proud princess with a frozen heart.
Perhaps Doris Kenyon would laugh at all this, but at bottom she would know it was true. She must be well enough aware that her real self has never yet come before an audience, and that by this very isolation she holds them sure. The attraction of the unknown, the unexplained, is a wonderful thing that the kinema has too much neglected.
We know too much about our stars and their private lives; they give away too much of themselves in every part they play. We feel sure of them, feel them to be ours for the asking, at the price of a seat in the nearest picture theatre. We come to expect their charms too cheaply, and grieve when we get to the bottom of the very charm we have demanded. But there is no danger with Doris, that complete understanding will break the spell.
Perhaps there can never be a complete understanding of girls with fly-away eyes…
There is nothing cold about Doris to the outward senses. She is charming and enthusiastic, ready to talk about anything and all things.
She is a mass of appreciations, quick to respond and generous in criticism. Her enthusiasms are music and Madge Kennedy, Farrar and colours. Her range of conversation is extraordinary, until you realise that she has done almost everything that an artist can do in her short life, and that there is nothing that she has done that she has not done well.
Originally, Doris Kenyon was going to be a doctor. She took her medical degree at Columbia University, but quickly turned from science to art, and began to make her name on the New York stage. Then the film companies ran after her, and she divided her work between the silent and the speaking drama for a considerable time, acting in the studios by day and behind the footlights by night. Neither the stage nor the screen could be persuaded to part with her altogether, so Doris, who likes hard work, has had to keep honours even, and is likely to do so for a considerable time.
But Doris Kenyon is more than actress All the arts have sent presents to her christening. She sings like a bird, and hopes to appear in grand opera in the near future. She dances like a butterfly; an elfin, soulless creature. And she is a poet, with several volumes of published verse to her credit. Her last little book was brought out in conjunction with some work of her father’s who is also a poet; a slim, charming volume, with that same curtain of mystery hanging over it, and the same resistless fascination of the unknown and the inexpressible, that has marked all her work, sung, danced, acted and in speech.
Doris first swam into my vision in “Get Rich Quick Wallingford,” a Paramount picture of two or three years ago, with Sam Hardy and Norman Kerry in the leading parts. Her film appearances have not been too frequent — not nearly frequent enough for her English admirers, who cannot console themselves for her absences from the screen by watching her dance and sing behind the New York foot-lights, or read her clever work in American magazines. One of her earliest films was a Pathé serial, The Hidden Hand, in which she played opposite Mahlon Hamilton; the one kind of acting which is entirely unsuited to her keen, chiselled technique and dignity of gesture.
Since then she has appeared in “The Great White Trail,” The Street of Seven Stars, “Twilight,” The Bandbox, “The Harvest Moon,” and The Conquest of Canaan with Thomas Meighan, and several other pictures for Paramount. But it is Monsieur Beaucaire that gives Doris her chance for a character study of real skill and originality, and allows her peculiar beauty to have full scope for the first time on the screen.
To Valentino must go the praise. The part of Lady Mary was cast elsewhere. Valentino demanded Doris Kenyon and no other in the part, declaring that she was the only woman who could bring to it the right atmosphere of frozen enchantment, the right aristocracy of gesture and pride of beauty.
That Doris Kenyon did bring all these and more is beyond all questions. Various players were criticised, when the movie was shown, for various short-comings. This one was too modern, that one too hard. But the chorus of praise for Doris Kenyon was without a single discordant note. She was aristocratic, she was beautiful, she was alluring and coquettish by turns, she swayed her audience as easily as she swayed her film court, with a glance or a gesture. Her remarkable grace of gesture it was that influenced Valentino when he insisted she should be his Lady Mary.
And Valentino had his way. Doris and Lady Mary became one, the loveliest, hardest, most fascinating heroine who ever graced an English screen.
Now all the producers are running after her, and she is scheduled to make as many pictures as there are days in the year — almost.
And still the problem of her charm is unsolved — a riddle of which she only knows the answer.
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Above and right: Two characteristic studies of Doris Kenyon.
Below: With Percy Marmont in Idle Tongues.
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Left: She is a colour enthusiast in both dress and decoration.
Circle: Doris in “If I Marry Again”
Below: As Lady Mary with Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire.
Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, March 1925
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Doris Kenyon’s graciousness and charm have attracted a public all her own, to whom her appeal will be all the more manifest now that talking pictures have opened a wider field for her, because of her experience on the stage.
Photo by: Russell Ball (1891–1942)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1929