Gertrude Olmsted — Blue Book of the Screen (1923) 🇺🇸

Gertrude Olmsted is another player who was started on the road to stardom by winning a beauty contest. Miss Olmsted was the winner of the Elks’-Herald-Examiner Beauty Contest of Chicago, conducted immediately after she graduated from high school in La Salle, Indiana.

Miss Olmsted [Gertrude Olmstead] won her honors as a striking screen type of beauty. This rare beauty that gave Miss Olmsted her start in pictures has made for her increased success in succeeding productions. Hers is not a cold, classic beauty, but an unusually warm and breathing beauty.

Miss Olmsted has chestnut brown hair and gray-blue eyes. Her complexion is fair. She is five feet two inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. She is a typical American girl type in appearance. She is a devotee of dancing, and the two sports which claim her enthusiasm are golf and tennis. She is a great reader and her favorite books among prose authors are Hall Caine’s The Christian, and Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. Among the poets she admires most the English master, William Wordsworth, and the Hoosier poet of America, James Whitcomb Riley.

Miss Olmsted’s histrionic ability is not inherited, as her parents were not theatrical people. She states that her great ambition is a “dim and dark secret, but worth while.”

Universal features in which Miss Olmsted has played leads or ingénues are: “Tipped Off,” “The Drifting Kid,” “A Key Too Many,” “Fighting Fury,” “Three in a Thousand,” Neely Edwards’ comedies and “The Lone Hand.”

In these feature pictures Miss Olmsted has acted in support of the screen’s most prominent male stars, among whom were: Hoot Gibson, Herbert Rawlinson, Frank Mayo and others. But it is predicted that the producing company under which she is signed will soon be looking about for stories especially suited to Miss Olmsted’s personality, for starring purposes.

Miss Olmsted lives in a Hollywood bungalow with her mother.

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Portrait by Melbourne Spurr • Los Angeles

Collection: The Blue Book of the Screen (1923)