Violet MacMillan (1915) 🇺🇸
“Dearie Girl” and “Fairy Girl “ are two of the most used names for petite Miss Violet MacMillan, the latest addition to the leading lady colony of Inceville, where Ince Features are produced. This little bundle of humanity is one of the smallest leading ladies in the moving picture field.
Tiny Violet is but fifty-seven and one-half inches short, and she can be weighed without putting on any of the balancing weights, for she tips the scales at an even hundred pounds. Sometimes affectionately known on the screen as Popularity’s Pet, she surely lives up to this title given her by an admiring public, for a daintier bit of femininity one seldom sees. She is a typical blonde, golden haired, and with a pair of big blue eyes that fairly talk on the screen.
Violet was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the fourth day of March; she smilingly refused to give the exact date. She attended high school in her native town and graduated from there. She was always interested in amateur theatricals, and hardly an entertainment went by without her name heading the program.
The public first saw her in The Wizard of Oz in the role of Dorothy. She was the original girl in The Time, the Place, and the Girl, playing the Broadway circuit for some time. After that, a year spent with Klaw & Erlanger, playing opposite Max Rogers in The Young Turk, fitted her for any kind of work. She was the leading ingenue in Girlies which played at the New Amsterdam theater. From that, a jump on to the vaudeville stage over the Keith and Orpheum time with a neat little act of singing and rapid costume changes made her quite well known.
Her film career started in Oakland, where L. Frank Baum took her from the Orpheum stage and induced her to enter the pictures. She came south to Los Angeles and was featured by the Oz Film Co., in the fairy tales of Mr. Baum. The pictures were The Patchwork Girl of Oz, His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz, The Magic Cloak of Oz, and a series of four one-reelers written for her and entitled “Violet’s Dreams.” When the Oz firm closed at the end of the year, Miss MacMillan went immediately to work for Thomas H. Ince at his beach studio, and ever since that time has been busily engaged in playing for his features.
Her first dramatic picture was A Modern Noble. Thomas Chatterton, now directing, played the lead opposite her, and the production was under the direction of Jay Hunt. The next story was His Brother’s Keeper, with Mr. Hunt playing opposite Violet as the slavey girl. Other pictures now being completed at this studio and in which she plays leading and title roles are The Phantom of the Hearth, The Artist’s Model and The Disillusionment of Jane.
Miss Violet is the little girl who introduced the “Woozy” into fashionable Pasadena hotels and society, giving it the slogan, “Be a Woozy — Be Square.”
With the aid of a big Winton “6” this tiny leading lady tours to and from her Hollywood bungalow. She is a staunch defender of pictures, and says, “It does seem most wonderful to enjoy home life and still be able to do the work one loves. I am enjoying my experiences at Inceville more than I can state, and if only the public loves my work as well as I love to do it I am sure my happiness will be complete.”
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“The Love Pirate”
Two-Reel Reliance presenting woman’s character from a utilitarian standpoint.
Reviewed by Louis Reeves Harrison.
Cast.
Viola… Fay Tincher
The Magnate… Raoul A. Walsh
The Young Clubman… Elmer Clifton
Without touching upon woman’s enfranchisement, The Love Pirate unconsciously raises a question of concession. Without depreciating noble women. and without belittling our ideals of womanhood, the story points out a very common weakness that is liable to remain a serious weakness in the gentle sex until they are given equal opportunity with men from babyhood. The very childishness that strong men often admire in women, possibly because such women are nearer to the children they bring into the world, is coincident with an inability to think logically, and liberty might not mean greater freedom of thought to such creatures but merely an enlargement of her range of caprice.
It is not at all strange that women who strongly attract men, whether by “fatal beauty” or by a peculiar fascination that makes her an easy medium for male hypnotism should live lives replete with adventure. The very lack of consciousness of what she is doing, sometimes ascribed to innocence, in her relations with men, is a sort of passivity, with which she receives affection from parents, relatives and friends, without apparent perception that she is merely a recipient, without, in contact with a lover, perception of wrong. This difficult portrayal is attempted in The Love Pirate and more delicately than adequately treated.
Viola Marsh discovers while at school that she strongly attracts strong boys. They fight for her, struggle for her preference. Her passive acceptance of the masculine point of view as to her value persists after she leaves school. She becomes the stenographer of a married man, one happy in his family relations, and her susceptibility is so great that she cannot act in opposition to it. She has no desire to destroy the happiness of his wife and child, but her opinions have become incorporated with his, and the very consciousness of her weakness rejoices in triumph over his slavery. He ruins himself for her and passes easily out of memory when she elopes with the next admirer. No real knowledge of what her course should be has appeared in her experience and it must come from the outside to affect one of her limited comprehension.
In a life of luxury she discovers among her servants a newcomer, the first admirer, driven by desperate poverty to become a valet. She becomes hysterical under the menace of his presence in the house. “I intended no harm,” is her self-defense. “It is all forced upon me.” She is incapable of understanding that she has wronged anyone until a letter from the first man’s wife falls into her possession. It tells of desperate poverty and misery. Viola is moved by a compassionate impulse to help the wife, and at last a conscience is awakened in her being.
The leading role is admirably impersonated by Miss Fay Tincher, and the story, self-defense. “It is all forced upon me.” She is incapable in spite of much constructive commonplace, will prove interesting.
Scene from The Love Pirate (Reliance).
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“Your Girl and Mine” in Nebraska.
The Suffragists of Omaha, Nebraska, headed by Mrs. Drake Smith and others, are working hand in hand with the World Film branch there to make Your Girl and Mine the suffrage picture, the talk of the year. That they have succeeded is evident for the attention that they are receiving.
Collection: Moving Picture World, February 1915
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Transcriber’s Note: The four Violet’s Dreams one-reelers in the Violet MacMillan story above are:
- A Box of Bandits (1915)
- The Country Circus (1915)
- The Magic Bon Bons (1915)
- In Dreamy Jungletown (1916)
Anthology release of all four movies: Like Babes in the Woods (1917)