May Allison — No More Pouts or Curls (1924) 🇺🇸
It wasn’t only the pouts and curls that drove May Allison out of pictures; it was all that they stood for.
She felt that she could no longer endure the changeless run of light, frothy stories, the dim-witted heroines, the endless flitting about and looking guileless in a halo of light.
She wanted to grow up dramatically, feeling that she had served her time as an ingénue. That is why she left pictures when her Metro contract expired three years ago.
“There is a limit to the number of ways you can pout and flutter and curl your hair,” May told me not long ago when I asked her if she thought she would make pictures again, “and that is all producers seemed to think I was good for. I won’t come back until I can play dramatic rôles. It is perfectly silly to think of a woman of my age bounding around like an ingénue and besides it seems to me that I played all the possible variations of the eternal ingénue in those old Metro pictures.”
A woman at her age! You should have seen her as she said it. Blond hair escaping in the wind from a tiny, chic hat; clear, blue eyes dancing; a mischievous smile. She is one of those girls who went into pictures when she was so young that at twenty she felt a veteran and now she tries to live up to the dignity of a retired old-timer. But appearances are against her.
She has been in New York for several months studying music and dancing preparatory to going on the musical comedy stage. But motion-picture producers have persuaded her to make an occasional picture, too. She made one last year, you may remember, for her friend Jane Murfin, who sympathized with her desire to break away from her usual type of rôle. The picture gave her a chance to wear her hair straight, at least, even if it offered no great dramatic opportunities. Recently she made a picture for C. C. Burr [Youth for Sale (1924)].
But now, at last, it looks as though she were going to have a real chance. Ernest Shipman is going to produce “The River Road” [Her Indiscretion (1927)] with an exceptionally able cast and May Allison will have the leading rôle.
Since the days when she was known as The Georgia Peach and Sylvia Ashton nicknamed her Cherry Blossoms, her sunny personality has been adored by many fans, and many a girl has wished that Providence might have made her look like May Allison.
But in addition to her sheer prettiness, May Allison has ambition. And she has such a highly developed sense of the ridiculous that she cannot take herself seriously as an ingénue. So the public will have to take her seriously as a dramatic actress — for they will never consent to losing sight of so great an old favorite.
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Photo by: Walter Fredrick Seely (1886–1959)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1924