Linden Travers — Lovely Linden (1937) 🇬🇧

Linden Travers has been chosen to play the leading role in a new screen version of "The Terror," Edgar Wallace's famous thriller, and below, Joan Carter tells you of her early struggles and successes.

They are very proud of Linden Travers in her home town of Newcastle. When she goes home to visit her people there she is given an almost civic reception and photographers and reporters meet her at the station.

Linden catapulted to fame when "Brief Ecstasy," the picture in which she played her first important role, had a pre-release run and all the critics hailed her as a coming star.

Now, as her second step towards stardom, she has been chosen to play the leading feminine role in the new screen version of "The Terror" (remember, the silent one of ten years ago which had Edward Everett Horton in one of his few serious roles?) — Edgar Wallace's famous thriller play.

Thinking it a good opportunity for meeting this very talented young woman, I went down to Elstree to watch her at work and to find out something about her career.

I found her in the middle of a very emotional scene with her screen father, Arthur Wontner. The set was the oak-panelled library of an old country mansion, and it made a perfect setting for Linden's aristocratic beauty.

Square-faced, with huge haunting eyes and high cheekbones, Linden has a poise and dignity that is often so sadly lacking in our English film actresses. Her acting is intelligent and inspired, and her voice attractively low.

When she had finished the shot, her work for the morning was over, and Director Richard Bird told her that she could go to her dressing-room and have her hair fixed for the big scenes in the afternoon. She was going to try out a new style and wanted to have plenty of time to experiment with it.

She asked me to go to her dressing room with her, and there we found Ella, a pretty dark-eyed Spanish girl, who has looked after Linden's hair ever since she came to London.

While Ella's deft fingers transformed Linden's flyback curls into a page-boy bob, Linden and I chatted.

I learnt that this very sophisticated beauty, who looks as though she has been brought up on a diet of milk baths, millionaires' yachts and moonshine, has a background as orthodox and unromantic as any girl of good middle-class family who has been brought up in a provincial city.

Her road to success has been built on hard, hard work and two very lucky breaks. There is no romantic "starving in a garret" or "running away from home" in Linden's life.

She was born in Newcastle twenty-three years ago. As a tiny child she would insist on reciting long poems at all the Travers' family parties. As she grew older she would write and produce short plays for her sisters and herself to act in.

But this interest in acting was no more developed than in any imaginative girl who likes to express herself this way. There was no thought of a stage or screen career for Linden then.

She went to school at a Newcastle convent where she became a model pupil, excelling at games and working studiously hard. She was a great favourite of the nuns, and at thirteen even dallied with the idea of taking the veil herself. She was a leading light in the school dramatic society and produced many plays herself, coaching the younger girls painstakingly.

As she grew older she had to think about choosing a career. And here she didn't hesitate. She knew that she had a great gift for teaching and a very sincere love for children. A school teacher she would become.

And then she had the idea of opening her own school for acting, elocution and drawing, all subjects at which she excelled.

After becoming head girl of the Convent, and walking off with a number of prizes, Florence Linden Travers (she has dropped the Florence now) left to open her school.

So there she was at seventeen with a school and thirty pupils, working so hard that she had no time for the relaxations that most "buds" of that age indulge in.

If it hadn't been for the big music festival, which is held yearly in Newcastle, Linden might still have been teaching small children how to broaden their "a's" and the glamorous film actress might never have existed She thought that it would be good for her school if one of the pupils entered for the dramatic recitation section of the contest but could find no pupil willing to face the ordeal. So Linden had no alternative but to enter herself.

She gave a piece of dialogue from Barrie's Quality Street, playing the part of Phoebe, and walked off with the first prize right before the eyes of two hundred competitors.

While she was telling me about this, she surprised me by saying that she would rather play a Barrie heroine role than any other. It amazed me to think of this exotic beauty, who is essentially modern and sophisticated, owning to a secret hankering for the sentimental and whimsical heroines of Barrie's plays.

After her triumph in this competition. Linden's friends told her that she was wasting her time in a school of elocution and suggested that she took up the stage as a career.

And then Linden realised that this must be what she had been working for all these years. All that hard work in elocution and acting classes, all the producing and acting in plays at school and home. It had only been to help her in her real career.

So she joined the Newcastle Repertory Theatre. Anyone who has ever played in repertory knows what hard work it is and how little spare time it allows the players. And it wasn't until she had been with the theatre for twelve months that she got a free week-end.

She made up her mind to come to London and try and get a small part in the West End. So. without a word to anyone, because she didn't want to have to come back and admit failure if she didn't get a job, she took a train to London.

Armed with an introduction from George Black, famous theatrical producer and a personal friend of her family, Linden got an interview which eventually led to her being signed up to play the ingenue lead in Ivor Novello's Murder in Mayfair.

So the little nineteen-year-old girl from Newcastle stepped into a leading role in a big West End show. It sounds almost like a fairy story.

When the show finished, Linden, although she had been a tremendous success, felt dissatisfied with herself. Always as critical of herself as of any of her pupils, she felt that she needed more experience to really make good in London.

So, forgetting for the time that she was now a West End star, she joined a Birmingham repertory company and had a vigorous six months there.

When she returned, her agent found her work in one or two quota pictures. But she didn't set the Thames on fire in any of them, siniph because they didn't offer her sufficient scope.

These films, however, did lead to a Hollywood offer, but Linden said that she would prefer to postpone her Hollywood trip until she was really established in English films.

Her big chance came when she met Edmond Greville, the clever young English director of the continental success "Remous," at a party. He was just going to start work on Brief Ecstasy with Paul Lukas, and he offered the leading role opposite the Hollywood star to Linden Travers.

Lucky — I'll say she is. But there is something behind all that luck. Directly you meet her you know that she has got something that the general run of young actresses have never heard of. And it is not sex appeal either, although she has loads of that, too. It is an intelligence and an understanding which I can only assume she gained when she was a school teacher in Newcastle.

Lovely Linden, the local girl who has mad' good in a big way… and in a short time.

Arthur Wontner and Linden Travers in a scene from "The Terror."

Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, December 1937