Virginia Valli — The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up (1924) 🇺🇸
Illness affects people differently. To many it leaves an aftermath of inertia, of devitalization. To Virginia Valli it gave not only a new crop of the cutest short, dark curls that ever framed a calm, sweet face — but it also bred in her almost a new personality!
by Helen Ogden
A year and a half ago Virginia was getting along nicely, but in no way particularly distinguishing herself, in those well-groomed, ornamental leading-lady rôles in Universal films. In The Storm she showed promise of dramatic ability, but somehow she lacked vitality, could not seem to let herself go, to develop individuality. Too repressed always, too much out of key with her surroundings. Reared quietly in Chicago, she came to the screen as an immature girl, strangely reticent, reserved. She did not seem to fit in at all in this make-believe film world where dominant notes ring accented peals. Her personality was negative.
Then came a year’s illness, when Virginia very nearly departed this life and during which she learned many, many important things.
“No, that year in a hospital didn’t awaken me to the seriousness of life,” she said recently. “Just the opposite — it brought out a frivolity I hadn’t suspected in myself. It made me realize the foolishness of taking everything so seriously. When you think you’re dying, you wish you hadn’t bothered so about things, had taken time for more fun. I made up my mind that if I ever got well I’d not hang back the way I had done before.”
Inhibitions, however, are not thus easily disposed of. Virginia has not become a glittering butterfly — she takes her pleasures still with that quiet, detached air of seeming to sit back and look upon them from a reflective distance. But there is a new vitality in her slim body.
To the peppy star rôle of “The Lady of Quality” — a madcap young lady reared as a boy until love’s awakening put her into quaint, old-fashioned skirts and flounces — she gave the twinkle of this new Virginia.
She has been doing something altogether different in Hergesheimer’s Wild Oranges, directed by King Vidor for Goldwyn. The story concerns a lonely girl who has only her dreams and vague romancings. of life for company, a brooding, imaginative girl. But it, too, has personality. Another distinctly individual rôle, is Sally Toliver, the heroine of “The Signal Tower,” whom Virginia is now transferring to the screen for Universal.
“Wallace Beery and Rockcliffe Fellowes [Rockliffe Fellowes] are to play with me. I like to have actors who probably will steal the picture from me,” frankly. “It will make me work all the harder. A year or two ago I wanted to do sweet, even-tempered, well-bred girls. Now I want rôles with more pep. And actors who will make me work like the dickens to compete with them.”
That equable calm is still hers, always she gives the impression of consistency, of quiet breeding and good taste. But she isn’t so negative, so repressed, as a year and a half ago. Her long illness is partly responsible for this subtle change, and partly it is an outgrowth of the confidence that is coming to her with success.
Already, although The Lady of Quality has not been generally released, her work has been widely commented upon and even critics who have not praised the picture itself have been impressed with her performance. Her featured rôle in Goldwyn’s Wild Oranges, which is to follow this, also gives her greater prestige in the film colony — a big factor in bolstering up a modest player’s confidence in herself.
Her eyes, which used to be mask-like, shutting in her thoughts, twinkle with a new vivacity now and she is fired with a new ambition.
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Virginia Valli has emerged after almost a year’s illness with a new vivacity and a lovely crop of dark curls.
Photo by: Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896–1979)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, February 1924
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