Lou Tellegen — The Return of the Great Lover (1924) 🇺🇸
Lou Tellegen is coming back to the screen after various exploits, romantic and theatric.
by Barbara Little
I have never heard any one rave about Lou Tellegen’s personality on the screen, but who can deny that in real life he is a vivid and magnetic fellow? Since 1911, when he came to the United States as leading man for Sarah Bernhardt, the daily papers have featured his love affairs year after year. He has been extolled as the modern Great Lover. And so it looks rather as though he were riding back into the movies on a wave of notoriety.
He will appear very soon co-featured with Pauline Frederick in a Vitagraph production of Basil King’s “Let No Man Put Asunder,” a story of divorce. The subject should not be entirely a pleasant one to him, as it was not so long ago that Geraldine Farrar divorced him with much attendant publicity.
Will he be the romantic figure in this picture that he has been in life? If he is, then old and young will succumb to his charms. Sarah Bernhardt, you may remember, was in her sixties and Mr. Tellegen but in his twenties when they became engaged. He was then her leading man. They never married, and when Mme. Bernhardt returned to France she urged Mr. Tellegen to stay in America where there were such wonderful opportunities for an actor. In 1916, Mr. Tellegen astonished the world by becoming the husband of Geraldine Farrar, whose unsuccessful suitors had included financiers, diplomats, brilliant writers and artists, grand dukes, some of the most brilliant musicians and composers of our day — and, according to rumor, a prince. For some time theirs was considered an ideal match — but in 1921 they separated and later his wife divorced him. Then Lorna Ambler, a beautiful Australian actress who had been playing with him in Blind Youth in vaudeville, admitted that she was engaged to him. Mr. Tellegen told reporters that she was mistaken. And Broadway began to whisper that already the fascinating Lou was enmeshed in another love affair.
Success has always come to Mr. Tellegen easily — in other things as well as love affairs. He made his stage debut as Oswald in Ghosts with such striking success that he was given a chance to play Romeo a little later. What Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree characterized as “obstinate success” followed him whatever he did. After his father’s death he went to Paris, where for a short time he knew the pinch of poverty. But he was happy, for he was studying sculpture under Rodin. He worked as model to support himself and his mother. Then he entered the Conservatoire and soon had offers of big theatrical engagements. He won success as actor — poet — playwright. And always there was talk of Lou Tellegen, the fascinating lover.
His real name was Isidor Louis Bernard Edmund von Dommelen, but he changed it legally to Lou Tellegen when he became a naturalized citizen of the United States a few years ago. He was born in Athens of aristocratic parents but lived in a little island near Amsterdam until he was fourteen years old. At that time he ran away, seeking the great adventures of life without family ties. He traveled through most of the countries of the world except China and Japan — and now he regrets that he didn’t also go there. He made his living at whatever he could — being in turn a baker, a carpenter, a tailor, and even a dramatic critic.
Once after a great success as Coriolanits at the Odeon in Paris, a great sorrow came to him and he rushed away to Brazil and went off into the wilderness of the interior on horseback, there to forget his sorrow. His interested public point to this episode as his one unhappy love affair — perhaps the one that inspired his perfervid play Blind Youth.
His acting has been described as a marvel of technique. Reviewers have alternately raved over his command of gesture as “subtle, flexible, terse,” and criticized it as being studied and artificial.
Will the screen public find him a lasting favorite, or will they just go to see him once out of curiosity? The eye of the camera is an erratic one — it brings out warmth and vivacity in some people who seem curiously aloof and cold in real life. And others who are vivid and magnetic — whose own lives are crowded with emotional experiences — seem cold and unresponsive on the screen. In his early appearances in motion pictures he seemed to belong to the latter unfortunate class; will he be able, coming back now. to bring out the charms that have made him a Great Lover in real life?
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Photo by Strauss-Peyton
Lou Tellegen has been pursued by what Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree characterized as “obstinate success” as an actor, a poet, a playwright, a sculptor — and above all, in his love affairs.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1924
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