June Keith — The Flower Girl (1916) 🇺🇸

And how she became a Photoplayer

I love flowers — perhaps because I was born in June, for that’s the month of roses, you know. Mother called me June, and the name has always clung to me — altho I do remember, in my pinafore days, of a red-headed, freckled little fellow who pulled my pigtails and called me “June Bug.”

Ever since I was a kiddie I’ve had my little garden, where I could plan just what I wanted. Each year I’ve raised different kinds of flowers, and it has been such fun to look after them and watch them grow — pansies, nasturtiums, sweet-peas, and, best of all, my bed of lilies-of-the-valley, hidden away in the coolest, shadiest spot you ever saw.

But I must tell you something of myself, mustn’t I? I ran away to go on the stage, and my first part, in a small stock company, was only one line, and my salary six dollars a week, yet I was as happy as a Broadway star. I played in that little stock company eight weeks, gradually getting better parts and a larger salary.

One day I secured a good engagement as ingénue with the Clark-Brown Stock Company, of Ottawa, Canada. I played the season there; then a summer season, as leading woman, in Milwaukee. I then had my first real opportunity in New York, as leading woman to Edmund Breese, in The Master Mind; then the lead in Stop Thief, and my last engagement on the legitimate stage was as Nan Ping, with Walker Whiteside, in Mr. Wu.

But the movies called to me, and now I am starring with the Essanay Film Company.

Perhaps some day, if you are a movie fan, I may come to know you, and, if I do, I’ll take you into my old-fashioned rose-garden and let you gather “June” roses to your heart’s content.

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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1916