Muriel Frances Dana — Mostly About Dolls (1924) 🇺🇸
A bewildering combination, six-year-old Muriel Frances Dana — as all children possessing personality and inquisitiveness are bewildering.
In keeping with the new order of things which demands child-naturalness upon the screen, Muriel is a wholesome, normal kiddie, possessing the long-distance, non-stop question-appetite of the world, a sincere passion for French pastry and dill pickles — preferably together — and an inherent thespic sense which responds, without self-consciousness, to the suggestion of “make-believe.”
She dances, sings, is taking piano and organ lessons, but her parents are striving to keep paramount the question of her future as a human being, rather than her screen career and are doing all that can be done to keep her unspoiled, though admitting it sometimes is a problem!
Photographically, she bears a certain resemblance to Baby Peggy. But there the similarity ceases, for Muriel’s work, particularly in “Daddies,” is free from the mechanical quality of Peggy’s, and is indicative of a purely individual talent, provided she is permitted to remain much herself: a girl-child not pretty in doll-like fashion but irradiating a quaint personality and appeal. Her forte is in just such a spirited characterization as she plays in “Daddies,” blending comedy and pathos.
“Muriel, you must tell me something about your work.”
“Yes’m, it’s lots of fun when they don’t goggle at you an’ say, ‘Isn’t she cute?’ I’m not going to be cute, I’m going to be a lady an’ wear a velvet dress with a train. See my new swings in the back yard? Know Jackie Coogan? He gave me an ivory chiffonier for my children’s clothes. Judy thinks it’s very nice, only now poor Judy’s awful sick.”
She is going to be featured soon in a picture called “Baby Fingers,” that was written around her personality.
“Judy has person — person — what you have to have to be a movie star,” Baby Muriel gravely informed me, displaying her favorite doll. “Besides, she’s got the croup. I’ve got it, too,” calmly. “That other thing, that you have to have,” patiently seeking to make clear to our dazed grown-up mentalities the myriad channels which a child’s mind may travel at once. “Mr. Ince [Thomas H. Ince] said I had it, per-son-al-ity, but I don’t know what it means. Only you got to. have it. Mother says always say thank you when folks’ say something nice about you, but always say to yourself, ‘What others say is all right, but it’s what you know you are yourself that counts.’ That means,” gravely, “you mustn’t get the swelled head.”
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1924