Fan Bourke, Thanhouser Favorite (1915) 🇺🇸

Fan Bourke is that ideal rarity in the theatrical and motion picture circles, a good comedienne who can play heavy emotional parts as well. She is both Irish and American, and is gifted with the whimsical and the tragic majesty that mark children of the Emerald Isle.

Miss Bourke was born in Brooklyn.

With her departure for a Canadian convent, the wanderlust that was to lead her around the world was born in the young girl’s mind.

The school Miss Bourke attended had housed Margaret Anglin and Bernice Golden. There lingered in the old classrooms the stage traditions naturally lent by their successes. But while in school. Miss Bourke’s aptitude seemed to run to literature rather than acting. She was encouraged in this work by the good sisters and became editor of the school paper.

But once she had graduated, the wanderlust really gripped her. Because she wanted to travel, but did not have the private income wherewith to gratify the desire, she hit upon the stage as a happy solution of her problem.

“And so it began,” she says. “I wasn’t really stage-struck. I just wanted to see this little old world, the odd and even corners of it. But the atmosphere of the footlights does one of two things to the girl novitiate; It frightens and repels her — or it gets into her blood like a drug.”

Fan Bourke’s first theatrical engagement was with Fritzi Scheff. The next season she was with Nance O’Neill and McKee Rankin. Miss O’Neill took an interest in Miss Bourke’s work, coached her, praised her a bit, and laid a sound theatrical foundation for that elusive Bourke temperament.

Miss Bourke had joined the Scheff and the O’Neill companies because both were booked to go to the Pacific Coast. Neither reached there. When they were ordered back to New York, their route list changed to take in middle west cities that had been skipped on the westward journey, everyone in the company wept with joy — everybody but Miss Bourke. She wept with disappointment.

There’s a bit of a will behind those Irish brown eyes. Miss Bourke still yearned to travel; she had gone on the stage to travel; ergo travel was what she would have. She realized her ambition by joining Lasky’s vaudeville operetta The Pianophiends, which toured the country for two years. Then, after an illness in San Francisco that necessitated her leaving the Lasky company [Jesse L. Lasky]. Miss Bourke and another girl toured the South in an act of their own The Brinkley Girls at the Piano.

In this southern tour Miss Bourke met Marguerite Snow and James Cruze, who were destined shortly to go to the Thanhouser Company, from which they sent for Miss Bourke. But she was out in Augustus Thomas’ Mere Man and, for a time, travel still appealed to her more than the studio.

Once she had taken the plunge into pictures, however, all the call to adventure and excitement in her veins was answered. After a few weeks in the Thanhouser studios she settled down. The wanderlust left her, expelled by this newer and greater interest.

At first the directors cast her only for comedy parts. But recently her native and acquired emotional ability won recognition. Her handling of heavy roles put her in a new light. And now, only a year after entering the picture field, Fan Bourke is balancing herself on the twin pedestals of Comedy and Tragedy with a skill that has made her famous.

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Jeff Davis in Pictures.

Jeff Davis, “The King of the Hoboes,” manager of the Hotel de Gink, New York City, is the latest recruit for pictures. Davis is president of the International Itinerant Workers’ Union of Hoboes of America, and represents 400,000 globe trotters. He has established in New York, with the aid of Mayor Mitchel and the Unemployed Committee, a unique institution known as “The Hotel de Gink.” The hotel, an old factory building on Centre street, has been leased to the hoboes. It is not a charity. No charity in any form is desired. Every hobo who registers at the Hotel de Gink wants work.

Jeff Davis has been a hobo for sixteen years for the purpose of studying the hobo conditions and devising a practical means of help for the fraternity. He has hoboed twice around the world, and three times around the United States. Davis defines the word “hobo” as follows: “Hobo — a man who goes about, from place to place, seeking an opportunity to make good.”

The Broadway Film Company will present Jeff Davis in The Bridge of Sighs, a drama of the under-world, in three parts, depicting social conditions today in this country. The story centers around “The King of the Hoboes,” and portrays faithfully the trials and tribulations of the man who is down on his luck. The Bridge of Sighs will be released on or about the first of March.

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“The Commanding Officer,” by Famous Players.

Miss Alice Dovey, one of the most captivating and brilliant ingénues in this country or England, in both of which she has won signal honors, and who was featured in the two recent theatrical successes, Papa’s Darling and The Girl on the Film, is now on her way to the Pacific Coast studios of the Famous Players Film Co., where she will assume the feminine lead in that concern’s forthcoming film production of Theodore Burt Sayre’s noted military romance, The Commanding Officer. So well and favorably known is this play as not to require detailed description. There are many striking and novel situations in the story.

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Lockwood in “The Lure of the Mask.”

Harold Lockwood has started work with director Thomas Ricketts at the American studios and is taking the lead in The Lure of the Mask which has been adapted by Mary O’Connor [Mary H. O’Connor] and which will be done in four reels.

Collection: Moving Picture World, March 1915