We Nominate for Stardom — Ruby Keeler (1933) 🇺🇸
Motion Picture presents the coming stars — They’ll be your future favorites!
She doesn’t look as if she’d ever have camera-fright, does she? But Ruby did — when she started 42nd Street. And then stole the picture! She attended the same school that Tom Brown did and, like him, was a Broadway prodigy. At 20, she was Ziegfeld’s star dancer. And Mrs. Jolson can also act!
Ruby Keeler — Warners-First National
Ruby Keeler may be Al Jolson’s wife in private life (and is), but she is going to be Somebody on the screen on her own account. Wait and see! She may have been the star of six of New York’s biggest musical comedy hits (and was), but she’s going to be an even greater hit in pictures, the Warner Brothers think. And after seeing that piquant personality of hers in “42nd Street,” we are inclined to agree with them.
Counting a year to each show that Ruby has appeared in since she left the Professional Children’s School in New York at thirteen, and then allowing four years of retirement as Mrs. Jolson, you will figure her to be about twenty-three. She has enormous Irish eyes and a pointed, elfin face. And can she dance?
Darryl Zanuck met her at the fights with Al, and his second remark to her, right after “How do you do?” was “Don’t you want to go in a picture?” Joseph Schenck had already asked her that, but Ruby figured that to start her screen career in her husband’s picture wouldn’t be so good. This was different. So Ruby became a movie player — a bit frightened “because nobody knows me.”
We Believe in Her
- Because not only is she a great little dancer, but she can ACT.
- Because she is not just a pretty girl — she is, photographically, a find.
- Because she was a Ziegfeld star — and Ziegfeld could pick ‘em.
- Because, after six years on Broadway, she was self-conscious before movie stars when she started “42nd Street.”
- Because she stole the picture.
- Because she would sign for only one picture, until Warners saw how they liked her — and now they have her tied up for seven years!
In making these prophecies about Ruby Keeler and Tom Brown, Motion Picture rounds out a full year of nominating newcomers for stardom.
Our previous Nominees, in order of selection, have been: Tala Birell and George Brent; Ann Dvorak and Randolph Scott; Gwili Andre and Bruce Cabot;Lyda Roberti and Robert Young; Gloria Stuart and George Raft; Dorothy Wilson and Dick Powell; Aline MacMahon and William Gargan; Katharine Hepburn and Lyle Talbot; Diana Wynyard and Preston Foster; Glenda Farrell and Buster Crabbe.
Several of these have already fulfilled our prophecies of stardom for them. (The only new stars of the past year have come from this group.) The others are on their way in increasingly big rôles.
Watch for their names in the casts of coming pictures. And check up on our prediction of stardom for Ruby Keeler by seeing her in the backstage drama, 42nd Street; and for Tom Brown by watching him in the rumfleet drama, “Destination Unknown.” — Editor.
Source: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1933