Estelle Taylor — Baffling Estelle (1924) 🇺🇸
A scant half-dozen years ago a slender, dark-haired girl with slumbrous brown eyes in whose depths a restlessness stirred, taught elocution to young dramatic hopefuls in a Delaware town.
Rebellion against the monotony of her niche roused her dormant ambition and took her to the stage, then to the screen. Several times optimistic words have been written concerning her, merited by a few bits of praiseworthy acting — but such experiences have always been followed by lapses into mediocrity.
The elocution teacher of a few years ago is Estelle Taylor, the Miriam of the Biblical prologue of The Ten Commandments, the Mary, Queen of Scots, of Mary Pickford’s Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
A woman of imperious beauty, Mary, Queen of Scots. She was courageous, her biographers report, and yet strangely influenced at times by impetuous vagaries. A woman, in short, of outward calm and of inward uncertainties. Estelle is like that herself.
Pleased when her work on the stage led her to pictures via a Fox contract, it was not within her province, she felt, to dispute; rather, she accepted, in her easy, contented way, rôles of monetary return but of little actual advancement. Now and then her work would merit notice; almost in surprise the critics “discovered” her again and again, in “While New York Sleeps.” “Footfalls,” “Monte Crista,” and see also A Fool There Was. But always after such a success she would drop through some inconsequential thing.
Recently, appearing once more out of obscurity, she gave a surprising depth of feeling to her Miriam in The Ten Commandments. And once again her name took on box-office value.
“My part in The Ten Commandments brought me an avalanche of offers and, somewhat astounded, I accepted the most money, playing in a succession of independent productions. I was too easy-going, too content with the things that were coming my way again — clothes, good living, a luxurious background. I love comfort.”
She stretched into a yawn, yielding the curves of her to the softness of receptive pillows. A Babylonian creature of eye-compelling, somewhat bold, beauty. An Egyptian slave girl, not versed in the craft of allure, but of an elemental fascination. The tawny light in those somnolent brown eyes held infinite possibilities for the imagination to conjecture with.
“But I saw the shoals ahead this time,” her matter-of-fact tone dispelled the image that her slumbrous type of beauty arouses in one’s fancy. “The independent producers will pay for big names, but they haven’t the releases and soon the patrons of the better-class theaters forget you.
“Jeanie Macpherson pointed out to me the harm of being exploited in mediocre films. ‘You girls make me awfully tired sometimes,’ she said to me. ‘You all want to get to the same ultimate point — and you all take the longest way there. You think of money, of immediate returns, instead of the final valuations.’
“I have made lots of money, so I am going to visit my grandmother and rest until I have an opportunity to do really good rôles for big companies that have the releasing advantages to offer, regardless of salary. I am tired of volplaning.”
If she will really allow her head to guide her instinct, as she promises. Estelle Taylor has splendid possibilities. There is something slightly crude, unpolished, about her, which but adds to her charm. The infinite arts and graces of appeal which most screen vamps add to their repertoires, that absurd posing, she has not yet assumed.
Her career has been such a baffling thing, with unexpected highlights of achievement, the more noticeable because of the mediocrity out of which they sprang and in which immediately she would again bury herself, that prediction as to her future would be futile. Her rôle as Mary, Queen of Scots will no doubt carry her once more upon an upward wave. After that — who knows?
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Photo by: Albert Witzel (1879–1929)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1924