Miss Heather Thatcher — Heather for Happiness (1919) 🇬🇧

Heather Thatcher — A British star of stage and screen who has proved that heather is lucky

The girl who is ever, yet never the same, is about the best way of describing clever Heather Thatcher, who has sailed into the harbour of our heart on the good ship “Gaumont.” Needless for me to say, she is pretty. You probably discovered it for yourselves in The Key of the World and Pallard the Punter, and you’ll simply be confirmed in your opinion when The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells, and The Green Terror, by Edgar Wallace, are shortly released by the same firm.

Miss Heather was sunning herself on a rock at Beachy Head when I ran her down the other weekend. It was her lovely, wavy, auburn hair that I recognised first of all — and she was combing it in the sun like a real live mermaid. For a moment I wished that all those who admired her in The Boy at the Adelphi, and on the screen, could have the little private view that I was sharing with the sun and the sea.

Then she caught sight of me, and in a trice the rippling tresses were pinned into a graceful little knot, and Heather was herself again.

“So you’ve not grown up yet,” I asked her laughingly.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, in tones of relief. “No, I’ve not grown up,” she mimicked. “So don’t you say I am.”

“Then what is your latest budget?”

“Oh, I’m just keeping moving.”

A Lucky Name

No need to tell me that. Two years ago Heather Thatcher went on the stage, and whether her first name brought her luck or not. I forgot to ask, but certainly she made good right away. So well did she succeed in The Boy, that only a few days ago the Vaudeville tempted her to forsake musical comedy in favour of revue, and in less than a week she had been wooed, contracted, and all, and “flitted,” as they say in Scotland, a few doors along the Strand to “Buzz-Buzz.” There her “ever, yet never the same” personality is standing her in good stead.

On the stage for two years, and on the films for nine months, Heather has only one grievance to air, and that is that she has never yet had a part that is really her. “And I’ll never be happy till I get one,” she said, as if she meant it. But the next moment she had forgotten her grievance in watching a lovely seaplane chasing the sun.

“See, I’m going to fly — just like that. A well-known flyer has promised to take me up at Hendon one day soon for a trial trip. And if I like it, it will be ‘Going Up’ to some tune.

How She Keeps the Sheen of Her Hair

But it wasn’t her flying aspirations I wanted to hear about, but how she kept her wonderful hair so wonderfully live and sheeny, and the secret, she tells me, is that she washes it as soon as it shows the faintest sign of growing limp. Washing, she went on to explain, didn’t mean a lazy soaping, a careless rinse, and the drying left to Mother Nature. But I’ll let her tell you herself.

“Make a shampoo with boiling water and shaved Castile soap, and scent with verbena — just a few drops. Then slosh it on — sounds like slang, but that’s the only word I know that expresses the application of a shampoo.

“Sometimes I follow it up, after rinsing carefully with tepid water, with a beaten egg. This I rub well into the hair and scalp, then rinse and rinse and rinse.”

“After every particle of shampoo and egg have been washed out of my hair, I dry the scalp thoroughly with a towel, as a little French maid I had for a time always insisted that too slow drying rotted the roots of the hair.

“And, when possible, I ask Mister Sun to come down and save my elbow-grease, as he had just finished doing when you appeared, Miss Gooseberry,” she laughed good-humouredly, gathering up her needlework in readiness to go.

So I wished her the very best of good luck from The Picture Show, and came off to give her love to you readers as I’m doing now — “whole shoals of it” was what she sent. Got it?

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Photo captions:

• Can I believe you?
• Pensive.
• Mischief brewing.
• Pleased to see you!
• Her trustful eyes.

Collection: Picture Show Magazine, August 1919