Emily Fitzroy — The Granite Woman (1925) 🇺🇸

Credit should be given Emily Fitzroy for imparting a new vigor and individuality to the typified rôle of motherhood. Legions of weeping, gray-haired mothers have borne their griefs courageously for the camera; we know the formula of mother’s heart-rending story.

Welcome, then, Miss Fitzroy’s mother characterizations, material rather than spiritual. They are vigorous, sharp-tongued, austere women, scheming for their children’s good in a hard, matter-of-fact way.

The curious thing about her is that she is not like that personally! For years she has cared tenderly for her invalid husband. Perhaps it was this struggle with the very real foes of life that has put into her mother work a hard reality in place of weak sentiment.

She was born in England, educated there and in Paris and made her stage début in London, visiting America a number of times to play in Shakespearean repertoire. It was during one of her American tours that she became interested in motion pictures. She has played in Way Down East, Peacock Alley, “Strangers of the Night,” The Red Lily, several Mary Pickford productions, His Hour, and “The Square Peg,” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and is now working in Never the Twain Shall Meet for Cosmopolitan.

“Driven,” that gem of a drama, offered her her first big opportunity. To her rôle of the mountaineer woman she gave a driving power that dwarfed the young-love story. And yet never was it forced, a thing of artifice. Through repression lived reality; it was as- though a dry fire burst into slow flame.

That is the type of work which she prefers and to which she alone seems capable of giving reality.

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Photo by: Clarence Sinclair Bull

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1925