Lillian Walker — How I Became a Photoplayer (1916) 🇺🇸

My debut in motion pictures was the result of my seeking a way out of a dilemma.

by Lillian Walker

I have been on the screen only a few years. Before that I was, when one considers my tender years, a figure somewhat widely known on the vaudeville stage.

However, it was a period of great uncertainty on the circuit. Engagements were too slack — there was more “laying off” than playing. Between engagements I did a good deal of posing for artists for subjects of an ideal nature — cover page types and so forth. For casual employment this work paid me particularly well, but — it was casual. Some weeks I made good money, and in other weeks there was little posing to be done. Therefore it was plain to me that the thing was as precarious, in a way, as the vaudeville game. Even if one does get $2.50 to $3 an hour for posing, and some days put in four hours at it, the fear of not obtaining work the next day or the next week becomes uncomfortable. It was then that my thoughts turned to motion pictures.

I knew very little about motion pictures. That is, I knew very little about the practical side of them. But I was very well acquainted with the general subject, from watching the screen, and I counted myself one of the most devoted “fans” of Florence Turner. Her work in comedy-dramas seemed to me to be the perfection of motion picture art, and away down deep in my soul I wanted to be like her. Artistry such as hers was completely to my taste. I wondered if it were possible that, with my stage experience and the praises my ringlets and dimples had been given by the artists, I might find also a place on the motion picture screen. Being harassed with the necessity of securing some permanent employment, I twisted up my courage to explore the possibilities.

My first inquiry met with encouragement and disappointment.

It was at Vitagraph that I applied, because this was the company for which Miss Turner was playing. Upon my visit there I carried a number of the most flattering photographs of myself that I could gather, and they were shown to Commodore Blackton [J. Stuart Blackton]. He liked them, and he approved what facts I was able to present about myself. For a moment I was happy. They were willing to try me.

Not because I had highly developed prima donna ideas did this proposition depress me. The cause was more directly the small pay involved when I compared it with what I could earn at posing. It was plain that I could not afford to spend any time around the studio at $2.50 a casual day— the stipend that ruled for extras in that period— when I could be earning that much a casual hour at posing. So I frankly said I would have to go into stock at a regular salary, or I could not consider it. This was a daring position for me to venture.

Yet for some reason they indulged me, and I was once more, elated when they said they would try me out in stock. And I went to work at Vitagraph.

The first picture I worked in was never released.

I will tell you about this picture. It was a comedy. The plot of it concerned a pretty girl, her irate father, a lover who was not popular with the parent, and an expert cowboy, who complicated the plot through his skill with the lasso. That is to say, he was supposed to have skill with the lasso. But the cowboy was a metropolitan product. Evidently he had never seen the pulsing plain. His lasso work was crude. When the picture was finished it was pronounced impossible. The picture, with me in it, was laid on the shelf. Some time later it was done over at the Western studio of Vitagraph, with a more apt cowboy, and released. But, of course, I was not in it. Another girl was. You see, I was still in the East.

But what kind of impression, you will ask, had I made by my work? And wasn’t I heart-broken because the film was discarded? No, I was not disconsolate. By the time that decision about the film was made I was already at work in another photoplay. And it was on the showing I had made in my first appearance. My presentation of the part had settled my status. I was declared a success. My next work was in “A Tale of Two Cities,” a film version of the Charles Dickens story, and was in company with Miss Turner, who was playing the feminine lead. I bad a minor part. This film, of course, was devoid of comedy. But my third film was a comedy-drama. It was called “The Wild Cat Well,” and I was featured. It was my first release as a star. In the next photoplay I again played the lead, but it was a vampire part, the title of the production being “The Inherited Taint.” But by this time I had so established myself that I was starred right along, and mostly in comedy-dramas. That, in such as “Green Stockings.” In the last few months I have appeared in dramas most often, but I could not appear in them if I had not the versatility demanded to carry off such roles. Among these are “Hesper of the Mountains,” “The Kid,” and “The Adventures of Bill.” A lighter touch is discernible again in a more recent release, “The Blue Envelope Mystery,” the Sophie Kerr story, in which I play Leslie Brennan, and in the forthcoming Irvin Cobb story, “The Adventures of Bill,’ a story which the American Banker’s Association is endorsing.

A great deal of my enjoyment of screen work is due to the intelligent and tactful direction of Mr. Wilfrid North. But all of my directors have been very thoughtful of me from the very first, who was Mr. Fred Thomson, who is back again with Vitagraph, now directing Mr. E. H. Sothern.

This, in short, is my motion picture history. I do not know what else to add. I have been asked frequently if I had any peculiar emotions when I first saw myself on the screen. Well, it may be peculiar, but my emotion took the form of hating myself. I have the same feeling in a modified form today. I simply cannot find much enjoyment in looking at myself. And I do not go to the theatre to see my pictures, because no matter how much the audience likes the sight of me, I have the troubled notion that I cannot be nearly as splendid as I would like to be. I am my own severest critic.

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1916
(The Photo-Play Journal for October, 1916)