Mildred Harris — “Stage Experience? None!” (1918) 🇺🇸
Can you imagine it? Girl — young, pretty — though her future as a picture star depended upon her answer, yet she said “None!” when the arbitrate of her dramatic destinies asked, “What stage experience have you had?”
We don’t expect you to believe it. Most any young girl, if her job depended upon it, would answer that question glibly enough — “Oh — stock in St. Louis; child parts with Hilliard; Shakespeare —” It would have been so much easier for Mildred Harris to lie about it. But she didn’t.
They had finished The Price of a Good Time, which was to justify Lois Weber’s judgment in picking Mildred Harris to star in it. Then one day Miss Weber asked, “What have you done on the stage, my dear?” Mildred says she was sure she was going to lose her job. But she told the truth.
“None!” she cried. “D-does it make any d-difference?” Miss Weber smiled. “Not the slightest,” she said reassuringly. “No one would ever suspect that you had not played both Juliet and Katherine the Shrew.”
Such originality is its own reward; but Lois Weber, to reiterate her confidence in the ability of her bantam leading lady, immediately cast her in other star parts, in “The Doctor and the Woman,” and For Husbands Only.
Why, Mildred never even appeared in private theatricals in her home town — which is Cheyenne, Wyoming. Miss Harris was sixteen, with some picture experience with Vitagraph, Reliance, N. Y. M. P., and Fine Arts when Miss Weber discovered her — just a year ago. Now Mildred is of that younger set in the Hollywood film colony which every other evening congregates at the Gish home on South Serrano Street, plays tennis, and occasionally “takes in” a picture-show.
It seems just the other day that Photoplay was running a picture of Mildred in short frocks and long hair and a great big hair-ribbon, playing with her dolls and wishing they’d give her grown-up parts to play. One look at these pictures will assure the most skeptical that it was really just the other day.
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An opportunity to exhibit her dancing was given her in For Husbands Only
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1918