Jewel Carmen and Her Charm (1919) 🇬🇧

Jewel Carmen — The charming screen star whose first name was an inspiration

Besides being beautiful, Jewel Carmen is one of the most interesting women on the screen to-day. When you see her on the screen you instinctively feel you are looking at a girl, full of the joy of youth, who has a love for all things beautiful. In her work we find she possesses very strongly a determination to find a worthy motive for the great majority of human actions. This characteristic adds considerably to her charm.

Miss Carmen says she does her best work in her home. The only thing she is particular about is that the thinking out of her work shall be amongst surroundings that are to her beautiful and harmonious.

Her Songsters and Their Names

Her exquisite little home carries out this idea perfectly. There is always ail abundance of flowers, and, swinging from high cages, out of danger from her pet cat and dog, comes the song of her birds. Jewel loves canaries. She has seven of them, and there is hardly a moment of the day when any one of the little birds is silent. And because there are seven of these birds, she has named each of them after a day in the week, as a surname, with some famous’ dinger’s name to top it off. Here is how the roll call sounds:

• Sunday Sembrich;
• Monday McCormack;
• Tuesday Tetrazzini;
• Wednesday Witzengrau;
• Thursday Caruso;
• Friday Fritzi Scheff; and
• Saturday Scotti.

She says all imitate their namesakes [Marcella Sembrich | John McCormack | Luisa Tetrazzini | Enrico Caruso | Fritzi Scheff | Antonio Scotti].

Jewel had to wear one of the new tight skirts in a recent picture, and this fashion may be the cause of losing one of our best stars in motion pictures.

“It is a case of either the tight skirt or the motion picture,” she said smilingly. “They do not combine very nicely, and I must banish one or the other.

“Nothing is quite so ungainly as a woman rushing along a crowded street in a tight skirt. But to comply with the last word in fashion is even more awkward for a motion picture actress, who is being mercilessly registered by the moving picture camera. How can the beautiful heroine look dignified when trying to escape from the clutches of the villain! How, again, can a villainess ‘stoop to conquer’ if she can’t stoop? And how, oh, how, can the star save her child from a burning building or a runaway horse if her ankles are impeded? Surely there must be some way out of this awful dilemma!”

Her Rise to Fame

Jewel Carmen has not boon sprung on the cinema public suddenly and dizzily, but she has worked her way steadily through a long range of good pictures until her place has become naturally among the select few who are featured as the centre point of a film. We have seen her give a wonderful portrait of the clinging little Lucie Manette in the immortal Tale of Two Cities, a wayward Agnes in “Playing Fair,” a fine-hearted Painted Lady in When a Man Sees Red, and a fine character study as Violet Carson in The Kingdom of Love.

Her Charm

It is almost impossible, any philosopher will tell you, to put a definition of charm into exact words, but perhaps a pretty exact description might be given “quality.” This quality Jewel Carmen has in heavy measure, and its value has been proved by the quickness of her journey into the full light of public favour.

She has probably the most wonderful eyes ever a woman was blessed with the pathos of their tears, the lure of their quick glance of interest in any one on whom they light with interest is indescribable. One feels on seeing her when she is building up a character on the screen for us that we are reading the thoughts of a crystal-clear mind, unspoiled by too much knowledge of the world, and yet inquiring eagerly what life is bringing to her.

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Photo captions:

• The smile that charms.
• Surprise.
• Wonder.
• Troubled thoughts.
• Her wonderful eyes.

Collection: Picture Show Magazine, July 1919