Thelma Percy (1920) 🇺🇸

The latest addition to the ever increasing number of stage children who are “making good” on the screen is Thelma Percy, who has been engaged by Universal as leading lady with Eddie Polo in his latest serial, The Vanishing Dagger, by Hope Loring.

Miss Percy, who is but seventeen years old, has been on the stage ever since she was nine, making her first appearance with Maude Adams as one of the fairies in Peter Pan. Since then she has played children roles in a number of Broadway productions until her sister, Eileen Percy, made such a success in Universal and other motion pictures that she advised Thelma to come to California, where the “water’s fine.” It must have been then that she passed through Cleveland and was interviewed by the famous Billy Leyser of the Cleveland News, an interview which you will see on page 36 of this book.

Many other prominent film stars began their public career as children on the dramatic stage. Mary Pickford played with Belasco when she was in short frocks; Mary Miles Minter made a hit in The Littlest Rebel when she was six; Priscilla Dean played little Minna in Rip Van Winkle with Joseph Jefferson; Viola Dana began acting before she was ten; Ernest Truex was a child phenomenon on the stage when he was five years old; Josephine Hill was prima donna of the Pollard Lilliputians when she was four years old; Frank Mayo played little Dave in Davy Crockett with his famous grandfather when he was five years old; Dorothy Phillips was playing with a stock company in Baltimore when she was still a school girl; David Butler was playing children’s parts in a San Francisco stock company of which his father was director. The list could be continued.

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Collection: Moving Picture Weekly, March 1920