Duane Thompson — She Knows What She Wants (1925) 🇺🇸

Her tiny stature is belied by the vim with which Duane Thompson goes in for athletics.

Her repertoire appears to include all the sports. She is firmly convinced that Red Oak, Iowa, will some day be famous as her birthplace; though with her family she moved to San Francisco, where she went to school.

Studies were irksome, and she preferred to dance. At fifteen she became a solo dancer at a hotel, earning her first money, thirty dollars a week — for two weeks. Then a very angry little girl reported at home that she had been fired. They said she was a flop because she could not smile while she danced.

In the chorus of a revue she learned the trick smile and danced her blithe way over a vaudeville circuit and into the movies. Eighteen one-reel comedies were made in quick succession, and her subsequent work opposite Walter Hiers led to an engagement as leading lady to Charles Ray in “Some Punkins,” though in between there were weeks when she didn’t work, and she might have cried if she hadn’t been so whopping mad.

At present her most overwhelming desire is “to go the round of all the studios and make faces at every doorman.”

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Photo by: Fred Hartsook

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, September 1925