Kathleen Key — The Girl Who Couldn’t Simp (1923) 🇺🇸

February 03, 2024

This is the sad story of a girl who did the right thing at the wrong time, who had hard luck, disappointment, and was threatened occasionally with downright disaster. But, never mind, it has a happy ending. She now has a long contract with the Goldwyn company and she is going to play a prominent part in In the Palace of the King. Her name is Kathleen Key.

by Rhoda Blair

She came into the movies at the ripe age of about fourteen by going out to the Ince [Thomas H. Ince] studio after school and hanging around hoping to be discovered and made a star. She played extra frequently and bits now and then. But those were the days when pouts and long, blond curls were the first essential of an ingénue, when excitement, or pleasure or ingenuousness was registered by a sort of St. Vitus dance and love scenes were played with the Australian crawl.

And Kathleen had straight, black hair and a sense of humor. Good things in their way, but with no market value in the movies just then.

“I couldn’t simp,” she told me, when I asked why it had taken opportunity so long to get around to her dressing-room door.

“I can’t jump up and down, and blink my eyelids and look guileless. I’m not a simp type. And yet I’m not a vampire type either. So, for a long time casting agents couldn’t see where I fitted in at all. There are thousands of girls like me in real life, I figured, and eventually some scenario writer will think of putting one in a story. And when that day comes Kathleen will be waiting at the casting director’s office as usual, asking if there isn’t a chance for her.”

About once a year ever since Kathleen started in pictures it has looked as though her big chance had come. Once she was signed up to go to Australia to be featured in a series of pictures, but the company blew up and all that contract brought her was an ocean voyage, some pleasant friends and a touch of cynicism. Later she was supposed to play opposite Snowy Baker, the Australian athletic marvel, but his pictures didn’t take the country by storm, so big production plans for him were dropped. More than a year ago Ferdinand Pinney Earle selected her to play the leading role in his long-heralded production of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and it looked as though Kathleen’s jinx had finally died after a long and active life. But no. The picture, acclaimed as a thing of wondrous beauty, got tied up in a law suit and has never been released. [Transcriber ’s Note: The movie was filmed in 1920 and released in 1925]

It was while she was playing in Emmett Flynn’s last special production for Fox that I met her. She refused to sit still in the cold, barrack-like dressing room and be interviewed. It made her feel self-conscious. Her idea was to get a taxi-cab, several ice-cream pies and go to a beauty parlor. So that was the way this possible star of to-morrow conducted her first interview. If they were all like that, interviewing would cease to be a paid profession.

Even through the days when work was scarce, she managed to support her mother and keep up a pretty little apartment in Hollywood. And as Kathleen is one of those slim girls with a slow Oriental gait she managed never to look commonplace, even when her clothes were ordinary. The hardest struggle Kathleen had was to make other people take her work seriously. Some boy was always coming along who wanted to marry her, give her a good home, and “take her away from it all.” But Kathleen really was interested in her work. What better proof of her sincerity than that she turned clown all offers to make her rich and idle!

Characteristically, her idols in the profession aren’t the remote stars who are at the very top, but the girls who are distinguishing themselves and forging ahead to-day. Louise Fazenda and Colleen Moore are two of the girls who were good friends of hers through all the dull days as well as the successful ones, and it is that sort she admires. She is worth watching. You will find her an amazingly beautiful young person, and if some one succeeds in catching her spirit of pessimism it will be a real contribution to the screen’s reflection of contemporary youth.

Kathleen Key — The Girl Who Couldn’t Simp (1923) | www.vintoz.com