Helene Chadwick — A Nice Girl from Main Street (1922) 🇺🇸

A nice girl. That’s Helene Chadwick. She’d be a nice girl if she were cast for the role of the vamp in A Fool There Was — which will never happen, because she’s with Goldwyn and that’s a Fox property. But you know what I mean. Helene in a slinky gown, with jet earrings, and smoking perfumed cigarettes, would still be a nice girl.

by Delight Evans

She’s just as nice now that she’s a film celebrity as she was when she was the first girl of Chadwick, New York — the town settled by her great-grandparent. I watched her posing as Psyche in the studio of photographer James Abbe during her recent visit to Manhattan. She was one of the loveliest things I — or James Abbe — ever looked at. Marvellous profile; fine little ears; beautiful hair; splendid shoulders — a true Psyche. And yet, even then, she was a Nice Girl. She is frank and western and unaffected in her street clothes. And yet — when you look at her as Psyche, or draped in a Spanish shawl, you think she must have mislaid a choice streak of temperament somewhere. That she may be one of those girls with dual personalities, and that some day she would let you in on the other one.

In spite of the fact that she can’t possibly be in more than her middle-twenties, she has been in pictures a number of years. She played second leads with Pathé for a while, and then went west, soon signing a five-year contract with Goldwyn which has still two years to run. She has been given some fine roles out in Culver City and has made the most of them. “Dangerous Curve Ahead,” the Rupert Hughes story, probably displayed her talents to best advantage. She is a well-poised dramatic actress who may yet astonish the world with a compelling piece of work. Considered for the part of Glory Quayle in “The Christian,” it was finally decided that she was too American in type to be cast for it. But she was presented with the role of the heroine in the next Rupert Hughes picture, so she’s happy.

Out in Hollywood, she lives in a bungalow court with her mother and her Airedale dawg. She hasn’t a limousine; she doesn’t boast of her library of first editions; she says she sings and plays a little and likes to ride; but that’s as far as she’ll go.

At that I prefer her to many of our more highly colored ladies, who may be more startling, who undoubtedly drive higher powered roadsters and own estates in Beverly Hills. She would, I believe, wear well. Not a little import, but a domestic product that you would, as they say in the sartorial establishments, “get a lot of good out of.”

The house where she was born, in Chadwick, New York, is pointed out to tourists by the admiring natives. Helene spent some time there on her visit east. She doesn’t use much make-up on the street, but she has bobbed hair.

That’s the only thing “radical” you would be likely to note about her — if bobbing the hair is any longer “radical.” I guess even the most old-fashioned folks would not hold that against her.

While she has been acting since she was very young she has never had a speaking part — all her histrionic work has been in pictures, though she confesses to an ambition to use her voice.

The gods have been kind in granting her those gifts which make for assured success and long popularity with the picture public. Nothing meteoric nor smashing in her acting, but a winsome, sympathetic appeal that stirs the emotions of her audience, and an intelligent understanding and interpretation of her roles. Of such qualities are great actors made.

Helene Chadwick’s large screen following is taken as a matter of course

And in her private life she gives one the impression of being as delightfully sincere and unaffected as she does on the screen.

Just, in other words, a Nice Girl.

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She hasn’t a limousine and she doesn’t boast of her library of first editions

Helene Chadwick spent her childhood in this good old fashioned residence of Main Street, Chadwick, New York. The town was named after her great-grandfather

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A true Psyche and yet — a nice girl

Celluloid success has brought to Helene this modest little Hollywood bungalow. Everything short of a marble castle is called a bungalow in sunny California

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1922

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Having recently divorced her husband [William A. Wellman] and failed in a court action to get free from her Goldwyn contract, Helene Chadwick seems an ideal player for “Law Against Law,” a picture dealing with divorce.

Photo by: Edwin Bower Hesser (1893–1962)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, December 1923