Winnie Brown — Stunting into Stardom (1922) 🇺🇸

Winnie Brown! Maybe you never heard tell o’ Winnie Brown.

by Adela Rogers St. Johns

Maybe that name doesn’t come inside your recollection at all.

But I want you to know about Winnie Brown. For the days of the old west, the picturesque old west that held more color and more fascination than any part of this country has ever held, is disappearing. And Winnie Brown is one of the last of its real inhabitants.

Winnie Brown, the greatest living cowgirl. The best stunt rider and broncho buster and horse wrangler that ever put on chaps. The idol of the real cowboys. The winner of rodeos and exhibitions from Cheyenne to Oklahoma.

Winnie Brown, to whom the motion picture fans owe so many thrills and whose face has never been seen before a camera. Who has done some of the most daring and difficult scenes the silversheet has ever recorded but whose name has never appeared on the screen.

But who at last is to come into her own and play not only the “stunt scenes” but the whole star part of a real cowgirl in a real western story.

You remember, maybe, times when you’ve seen the serial star race her horse alongside a train going 40 miles an hour and then leap from her saddle to the rear rail of the observation car — or maybe jump her pony down a 100-foot cliff.

Ten chances to one, that was Winnie Brown.

Perhaps you have sat in your comfortable theater seat and seen the persecuted ingénue jump from the ninth story of a burning building — actually jump right out into space where no net was visible.

Winnie Brown!

And the lovely star who rode, perhaps, a whirling, threatening jam of logs down the dark and dangerous rapids of a great river — That, too, was Winnie Brown.

The most daring, reckless, skillful double the movie game has ever known, that’s what Winnie Brown has been.

There’s hardly a great star in the game today for whom Winnie Brown hasn’t doubled. There’s hardly a piece of wild and death-defying business that Winnie hasn’t performed.

Yet to her audiences she has been nameless, faceless, unknown.

When she has gone to see herself upon the screen it has been in the clothes and under the name and mask of some other woman. The credit for her work has gone elsewhere.

“That don’t matter none,” said Winnie Brown, turning her fine, dark eyes on me, “I got the mazuma. An’ don’t say too much about the doublin’ part. Most o’ these here stars don’t like for folks to know they use a double. An’ o’ course it ain’t their fault most o’ the time they do — it’s the company makes ‘em. If I bust a coupla o’ ribs or a laig or two, it don’t make no difference. I got a swell doctor and he fixes me up cheap. But if one o’ them fancy stars gits mashed up or her face scratched, it costs the company a whole wad o’ spondolicks.

“Most o’ the girls I’ve doubled for would have been willin’ to tackle it themselves all right, only the company wouldn’t hear to it, and besides, those skirts ain’t got the trainin’.”

Winnie has donned the grease-paint and become a western leading lady.

Winnie is going to play the leading role in a real western picture, written specially for her You are going to see a real cowgirl in action. And there are more real stunts in this picture than were ever written into one script before.

“Reckon she’ll have to have a double herself, ‘fore she gits through,” said Soupstrainer gravely.

Frances Marion is the discoverer of Winnie Brown. Miss Marion, for a number of years scenario writer and director for Mary Pickford, and now scenarioist for Norma [Norma Talmadge] and Constance Talmadge, discovered Winnie when she went to look at some horses. And she decided to give her a chance on the screen.

So Winnie Brown has become a motion picture actress.

“Do you like it?” I asked, when I had limbed to a seat beside her on the rail fence.

“Reckon I do. Course I’m scared plumb to death. Long’s I can stay by a hoss, I’ll git by all right. I’ve always wanted to take a chance on actin’.”

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Frances Marion, who discovered Winnie Brown, is shown at the right, discussing stardom with the stunt girl. Miss Marion is now making the first Winnie Brown picture

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1922