Patricia Ellis — She's Making Up for Lost Time (1937) 🇬🇧

Patricia Ellis works hard, plays hard, and lives every moment of the time.

by Max Breen

When I first contacted her she was contacting flies, with a swatter. This was in a charming olde worlde cottage in the village of Denham, which in itself is just about as olde worlde as anything to be found in Bucks.

Patricia has rented the cottage while she is working at Denham studios in "The Playboy" for Marcel Hellman's new company, Excelsior.

The two leading men are Jack Hulbert and Rex Harrison, and one of those celebrated bitches has occurred in the script, so that production of The Playboy has been postponed for a fortnight, and Pat suddenly found herself a playgirl with time on her hands. So she's flown to Paris.

I was interested to discover what made this extremely youthful veteran (Pat's twenty) so full of energy.

"When I was a kid," she told me, "I had a serious illness which kept me in bed for over two years.

"Naturally I used to lie and think what I would do if I ever got well — which seemed a little doubtful now and again — and I decided that if and when I got off that bed I'd never waste any time again."

She certainly seems to have stuck to that decision. She's crammed more activity into her score of years — minus the two blank years in bed— than the vast majority of people.

"But it isn't only those two years that I have to make up," she assured me. "As a child I was always ailing, always away from school for some reason or other. Up to the age of ten I missed on an average about two-thirds of each term."

"But what was the trouble?" I asked.

"Oh, all the usual childish ailments, and scarlet fever, and three operations for mastoid, and a broken arm, and two broken knees, and —"

"But why did you have to break yourself so persistently?"

She laughed.

"I had a very bad habit, of which I've fortunately cured myself, of falling down. I guess I didn't look where I was going, or something."

There may be something to be said for cramming all your misfortune into the first few years of your life. Pat now looks the picture of health — a lovely, lithe, graceful person, who might well pose for a statue of American Youth.

One slight disability she has inherited from those early, invalid days. The mastoid operations have left her deaf in one ear, so that when people are on her bad side and she doesn't see them speak she very often misses their remark.

"It worries me, because people who don't know about it sometimes think I'm high-hatting them," she complained.

Certainly no one who does know her would ever imagine that she would be high-hat. She "knows her stuff" — well, she ought to; she's been in forty pictures — and occasionally she sets a fairly firm little jaw when she knows something's being done the wrong way. But I've spoken about her to quite a number of folks in Hollywood who've worked with her, and the general consensus of opinion is that she's a good trouper.

And that's high praise among actors.

She was about thirteen when she made her stage debut; she was living with her people just outside New York, and she managed to get a small part in a play with a stock company — just, she thought, for the two weeks of the Christmas holidays; but play-acting turned out to be the thing she could do, and she stuck to it.

Before she was quite seventeen she was playing the leading role opposite Jimmy Cagney in “Picture Snatcher” in Hollywood.

That was actually her fourth film.

She was "spotted" in New York while playing in Once in a Lifetime. Once was enough; Warners signed her up on a five-year contract.

For a while she marked time in the studios. Then she had a "bit" to do in “Central Park,” and another in “Three on a Match,” and by this time she was all ready for fame.

Two things happened then almost simultaneously. She was chosen by George Arliss to play the ingenué lead in his film “The King's Vacation,” and she was elected a Wampas Baby Stars.

As a result of her work in the Arliss picture she was cast in Picture Snatcher, and the title turned out to be prophetic as far as she was concerned, for she has run away with a good many pictures since then.

Of all the films I've seen her in, I think perhaps I liked her best in "Boulder Dam;" and I told her so, rather expecting to be put firmly in my place, for it wasn't a very important film.

To my surprise she said: "It's curious you should feel that way, because it's the one I most enjoyed working in. For one thing, I never liked anyone as well to play opposite as Ross Alexander. That boy was headed for a great career; his death was a terrible tragedy."

Pat's abounding vitality and energy have been responsible for legends about her athletic prowess; but actually she has two outdoor recreations at which she excels — riding and swimming — and she also plays badminton, but, she complains, not particularly well.

By the way, I mentioned above that she had "marked time" in the Warner studios when she first went out to Hollywood.

When she told me this I was reminded of the case of Janet Johnson, which Guy Beacon reported in the Picturegoer last week.

Janet, you remember, went to Hollywood on a long contract, and after four months of complete neglect she gave it up and came home.

"To a certain extent it happens to most newcomers," she declared. "They keep you hanging about, partly to give you a chance to become accustomed to the surroundings and the climate, and partly as a kind of Ordeal by Boredom, to see if you can 'take it.

"But four months! — no sir, that's another matter. And especially if she's an English girl who wouldn't be likely to have friends there and who would be feeling pretty strange anyway.

"Anyone might have found that too much."

I asked Pat what kind of parts she wanted to play.

"Oh, comedy," she replied promptly. "Not slapstick so much, though I believe that's the soul of comedy, but 'high' comedy — sophisticated, subtle, sparkling stuff."

Well, I hope she gets her wish, and I hope she gets it in our studios — partly because I'd like to see her doing that sort of thing, partly because she's clever and can do it, but chiefly because she's a charming person who was as easy and pleasant to interview as anyone I've met with in a month of Sundays.

And, as you may have observed, I meet plenty.

Here's Pat — but she won't be sitting still for long.

Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, July 1937