Winifred Bryson — A Beauty with Possibilities (1924) 🇺🇸
I’m wearing an irresponsible mood to-day,” Winifred Bryson greeted me one day recently when I called for her at the Wilshire apartment where she and her husband, Warner Baxter, live. “Besides, I’ve five whole Baxter dollars to treat you on. If there is anything I love to do it is to spend my dear better half’s money. I could never feel so extravagant if they were dollars I had earned myself.”
When a cerise blouse had been donned over a white sport skirt and a chic little white hat had been drawn down over her brown hair, and the money had been left for the iceman and the dog had been corralled in the back yard, we were off.
They’re a very happy and outwardly a most commonplace young couple, the Warner Baxters. Warner, recently elevated to stardom by Robertson-Cole, is, like numerous other young husbands, none too keen about his beautiful wife’s silver-sheet aspirations.
“We were together for years on the stage, though, and I do so want to achieve something on my own account.” She discussed the problem much threshed out in Hollywood as we drove to the Montmartre. “I started in stock when I was eighteen, here in my home town, Los Angeles. After we were married, five years ago, I went along with Billy — that’s what I call Warner— while he toured with road shows. He wasn’t getting a big salary, so to be with him at not a great expense to the company, I would take any little part that I could get, though I had played leading lady in stock before our marriage. We played together with Maude Adams and with Marjorie Rambeau.
“And such times!” The brown eyes twinkled. “I loved the little suppers after the performance in some jolly, funny French or Italian café — the camaraderie of it all.
“When he came out here to enter pictures, I decided to try the screen too. He doesn’t quite approve, principally because I’ve never been strong and he’s afraid for my health. So every once in a while I give it up and stay home and play nice little girl-wife and mend hubby’s socks and yawn while he’s at the studio all day. Then he sees how miserable I am and relents and lets me come back.”
Though she had played a couple of second leads before, it was Miss Bryson’s work in Mabel Normand’s Suzanna that brought her to notice as a potent siren.
Her voice is husky, vibrant, somehow compelling. “I would like to register my plaint against the producers’ habit of grooving people into one type,” she told me. “Because I happened to make my first hit — if you generously care to call it that — as a vamp in Suzanna, it now seems that to the end of my mortal life I am to vamp. Even though they have put a blond wig on me in Baby Peggy’s ‘The Right to Love’ for Universal, still do I cast designing glances from my eyes and ensnare man.
“The screen vamp,” her lambent brown eyes — the biggest, most expressive brown eyes that have ever focused their light momentarily upon me — flashed sudden fire, “is so unnatural. No, I’m not cut out for an ingénue — Heaven forbid! — but I do want to play human women. That’s why I loved doing Lullaby Lou in ‘Thundering Dawn’ — a girl who knew life, whom life had treated unkindly, bitter, cynical, of none-too-strict morals, but with little human faults and virtues. I want to do things with emotional power.”
Hollywood believes that Thundering Dawn will bring Winifred Bryson into the front ranks of the vamping ladies.
“I love to free lance because I meet new people every day. I don’t want to feel tied down to anything permanently outside my home and Billy. Maybe I don’t take my work seriously enough — I certainly never could consider a career of such paramount importance as some of these actresses do, sacrificing everything— health, strength, friends, personal happiness — to it, hanging on so tenaciously when it is often hopeless. I want to do something worth while, of course — I think everybody wants to do well whatever one is trying — but I’m not going to get silver hairs among the brown worrying over it.”
Besides her pique because the producers want to rubber stamp her as a vamp, she wishes that directors would permit actors to develop their own technique.
“With each director, you have to begin all over again. One will teach you to do a thing a certain way, the next will say, ‘That’s all wrong, do it this way,’ and you start in kindergarten again. I’d like some time to have a director who would just turn me loose, let me have my one fling and find out for myself if I really have anything or not. If I haven’t, I’ll join the sock-darning brigade for good and be contented.”
It is pleasant to find one young woman human enough to place the other things of life before ambition. But if she ever does begin to realize her potential promise and wake up and go into the thing heart and soul — watch out for Winifred Bryson!
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Photo by: Albert Witzel (1879–1929)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1924