Kathryn McGuire — An Orchid of the Thrill Plays (1925) 🇺🇸
To look at Kathryn McGuire you would never imagine that she would come into the classification and category of indestructible heroines.
She is so fragile, so delicate and orchidlike that you would expect her to be cast only for such sympathetic and appealing maidens, with hearts that echo old refrains, as Lillian Gish has created hauntingly for the screen. Slender, with hair of light and evanescent brown, and eyes plaintively hazel; manner somewhat unduly repressed, she is a true sotto voce and dreamily attractive personality.
Yet — when Buster Keaton was seeking for a girl to go through a series of madcap exploits with him during the filming of The Navigator, it was not on any vigorous viking’s daughter that his choice settled. Instead, he found more susceptible of that sympathy appropriate to the heroine of the comedy, the sensitive, wistful grace of Miss McGuire.
She had had experience, of course, in thrill comedies. She had played the much-persecuted heroine in “The Crossroads of New York” at Sennett’s [Mack Sennett], and had been both pursued and protected by the stalwart Ben Turpin in “The Shriek of Araby.”
In “The Crossroads” she had replaced two other girls chosen for the lead — she had at first had only a bit.
And she had shown herself a typeperfect victim for the villain’s torturing devices. Also, in one or two thrill sequences, proved that despite her apparent frailty she could troup, had nerve.
Comedy leads seldom mean much to a girl in pictures, but The Navigator, was an exception. In at least three-fourths of the scenes aboard the disabled vessel, the setting for most of the film, Miss McGuire took a part almost coequal in importance to that of the star.
She didn’t have to plunge into the ocean quite as many times, nor don a diver’s suit in order to do sub-sea stunts, as he did. But she put up with the discomforts of being drenched by the sea and prop rain.
Since that picture Miss McGuire has been rated such a good trouper that the makers of Western thrillers are demanding her services. She appeared as the lead in a Jack Hoxie feature, “Find the Man,” and in an independent Western called “Trailin’ Trouble.”
Miss McGuire was only in her third year in high school when she started in pictures, and it was the study of dancing that really opened the way. The late Thomas H. Ince saw her dancing at a hotel in Pasadena, and offered her her first work, terpsichorean bits in Dorothy Dalton and Jack Pickford films. Right thereafter Sennett’s signed her up.
It is the dancing, too, that has given the strength to her muscles and slender fragile form, that enables her to withstand the wear and tear of playing in the comedies and other black-and-blue plays.
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Photo by: Waxman
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, May 1925