Dot Farley — Comedienne, Tragedienne and Photoplaywright (1914) 🇺🇸

June 22, 2024

I remember about a year ago seeing Dot Farley on the screen at a Hollywood theatre in a Frontier Film which kept the audience alternately chuckling and roaring throughout its length; in Los Angeles the following night at a first run theatre I saw Dot Farley in a society drama; and later in the week I held my breath over her daredevil escapades in a Western photoplay.

by Richard Willis

Now there is nothing amazing — though it is fairly unusual — to see an actress in three such widely varying roles as these. But it is amazing to find her playing all three of these roles so uncommonly well. She used all the time honored devices of the slap stick comedy, but with a difference — a difference that invested falling upstairs, jumping over a hedge or simply making a face with so irresistible an appeal that the audience was convulsed. In the society drama she held one spellbound with admiration of her flawless interpretation of her role, and in the western play her feats of daring left one gasping. It was easy to believe the common report — “that Dot Farley will do anything.”

Before I go any further let me explain why I am calling Miss Farley so familiarly Dot Farley. Her real name is Dorathea, but if anyone called her that suddenly she would probably look around to see who was wanted without its occurring to her that Dorathea was her own name.

“You can see that I’d not feel at home if anyone called me Dorathea,” she remarked, “when you learn that I went on the stage when I was three years old — doing a song and dance in E. A. Macdowell’s Wedding Bells — billed as ‘Chicago’s Little Dot’ and have never known any name but Dot since that time — and don’t expect to lose it until I retire,” she added thoughtfully.

“What!” I said, much startled. “Have you retirement in mind?”

Miss Farley laughed. “Certainly not for a long time yet — although I do rather look forward to the time when I can settle down in a home all my own with my flowers and my horses and be a real nice family sort of person and have a cat and dog.” I had to confess that while I was certain that she could be “real nice” if she tried, I couldn’t imagine her “settling down.” “Settling down” has an astonishingly inactive sound and Miss Farley and activity are such boon companions that one can’t conceive of one without the other. But in our discussion of “settling down” it developed that by this Miss Farley meant simply giving up acting which forms a large and important part, but is by no means the whole of her work. Few people know who writes the photoplays and especially in a case like Miss Farley’s, who would ever hear, for instance, that she has written more than 200 photoplays all of which have been produced on the screen.

She got her start in writing photoplays thus: Once upon a time when she was with the St. Louis Motion Picture Company, they were up against it for a story, really up against it, and Miss Farley came to the rescue with “On the Verge.” It was a photoplay with a cast of only three people which was then almost unheard of in a picture play and in many other ways it was so entirely different from anything they had ever had, that they were all enthusiastic over it. Since then Miss Farley has written a great number of the plays which have been produced by her company and in which she herself has acted. She says that she does not enjoy writing comedies as well as dramas and western stories, but that she writes a lot of comedies just the same. With characteristic modesty and generosity Miss Farley gives most of the credit for the success of her comedies to her director, Mr. G. P. Hamilton, the president of the Albuquerque company, “who has a perfect genius for adding those little touches of humor which make or unmake a comedy or slapstick farce, and in Mr. Hamilton’s case it is always ‘make’ and never ‘unmake,’” she said enthusiastically.

You may have noted that I used the phrase “characteristic generosity” in connection with Miss Farley. And I believe that generosity comes nearer to being that attribute of this charming actress that is most characteristic than even her energy, her ambition, her sunny good nature. She is, in fact, too ready to give credit to others, especially if you have no means of gaining information about her other than from herself. But I had the advantage of knowing Miss Farley by reputation before I met her and I had the further advantage of meeting and talking with her mother.

Alma Farley, Dot Farley’s mother, is also a member of the Albuquerque company — not because she is Dot Farley’s mother, but by virtue of an ability won and demonstrated on the legitimate stage through years of work. It is difficult to discover whether Mrs. Farley admires Dot more than Dot admires her, but it is not difficult to discover that the admiration of each for the other is superlatively high.