Milba K. Lloyd — The Only One of Her Kind (1924) 🇺🇸

Milba K. Lloyd bears the distinction of being the only woman plaster-molder in the Hollywood studios, for the plaster shop, where they turn out everything from ornamental ash trays and decorative bathtubs to leering gargoyles and Egyptian sphinxes of bronze, is usually man’s domain.

Trained in the Liverpool School of Art and the London Royal Academy, Miss Lloyd has received many commissions from England to model heads.

“In motion-picture work I first design my statuary in clay, then execute it in bronze molding,” Miss Lloyd explained in her workshop atop the big Paramount stage. “Some of the bric-a-brac and statuary for film scenes is made of a porous plaster of white-dust preparation that makes the completed piece not so heavy or cumbersome as when made of marble or bronze, but many of the larger figures are made from small clay models into the big bronze statues, with as much care as if intended for some art gallery exhibition.”

Perhaps her most skillful work was modeling the thirty-five foot statues of Rameses used in the settings for The Ten Commandments. Often she must execute reproductions of famed statuary on exhibition in European salons, or enshrined in cathedral — pieces so well known to art students all over the world that accuracy is necessary. Working from photographs and measurements, she fashions her clay models, from which the plaster shop makes the large statuary.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1924