HistoricalFindings Photo: The Hungry Heart, Alice Brady, Mary Rose, Actress c1917
(8x12 inch Photographic Print from a high-quality scan of ...)
8x12 inch Photographic Print from a high-quality scan of the original.
Title: The Hungry heart
Date Created/Published: New York : Chelsea Litho Co, c1917.
Summary: Motion picture poster for 'The Hungry Heart' shows a butterfly with the shape of a woman ( actress Alice Brady?) hovering near roses.
Notes:
Title from item.
Caption: From the famous play 'Frou Frou.'
Copyright 1917, World Film Corporation.
Subjects:
Brady, Alice,--1892-1939--Performances.
Butterflies--1910-1920.
Roses--1910-1920.
s--Color--1910-1920.
Motion picture posters--American--1910-1920.
Bookmark /2007680347/
Bookmark:2007680347
Bookmark:2007680347
Note: Some images may have white bars on the sides or top if the original image does not conform to the 8x12 dimensions.
Source: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Alice Brady was an American actress. She is famous for her remarkable talent which she demonstrated appearing in almost 100 films, transitioning from silent movies to talking pictures, all while continuing to perform on stage in New York City.
Background
Alice Brady (born name Mary Rose Brady) was born on November 2, 1892 in New York City. She was the only child of William A. Brady, noted showman and actor-producer, and Rose Marie (Rene) Brady, a Parisian dancer and singer, who died when her daughter was very young. Alice had one half-brother, the son of Brady's second wife, the actress Grace George.
Education
Alice received a good education at the Convent of St. Elizabeth, Madison, New Jersey, and was then sent by her father, who disapproved of her becoming an actress, to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston to study for opera under Theodora Irvine.
Career
Though possessed of a sweet high soprano voice, Alice Brady grew discouraged at the length of time required to prepare for an operatic career and decided to go on the stage. After appearing in 1909 without her father's knowledge in an open-air performance of As You Like It, starring Robert Mantell, at Deal Beach, New Jersey, she won Brady's approval by competently playing at a matinee one of the three little maids in his production of The Mikado at the Casino, New York City, in May 1910.
She first appeared in New York under her own name as Olga in The Balkan Princess at the Herald Square Theatre, February 9, 1911. The play was a failure, but she remained at the Casino, singing Gilbert and Sullivan roles.
In October 1912 she scored a hit as Meg in Little Women, which opened in New York at her father's theatre, the Playhouse, and ran there until July 1913 when she closed it to star in another play.
Only twenty years of age at the time, she ascribed much of her good fortune to the coaching of her stepmother, Grace George. In 1914 she toured for forty weeks with the Gilbert and Sullivan company of DeWolf Hopper, playing many one-night stands. Brady later referred to her proudly as "a trouper by birth. "
From 1914 to 1918 she acted in eighteen silent pictures, starring in such films as The Gilded Cage and Bought and Paid For. Returning to the stage with a sharpened sense, as she put it, of "the subtlety that lies in economy of motion" and "the artistic value of sincerity and simplicity", she appeared in September 1918 at the Central Theatre, New York, as Jennie in her father's production of Owen Davis's Forever After. This was her greatest hit, the play running for two years on Broadway and another year on the road.
Between Jennie and Marion Froude in Biography, her last stage role, Alice Brady played many parts, remarkable for their variety. The best of them was her powerful impersonation of the haunted Lavinia Mannon in Eugene O'Neill's trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra.
Under her own management she had previously appeared with considerable success as Ina Bowman in The Bride of the Lamb (September 1926) and in three other plays. Her last role on the New York stage was Madame Galvosier in Mademoiselle.
The rest of her career, which was cut short by cancer, was spent in Hollywood, where she earned a wide reputation in talking films.
At one time she played in twelve consecutive failures. Illness kept her out of the cast of O'Neill's Strange Interlude, and although the part of Sadie Thompson in Rain (which brought fame to Jeanne Eagels) was written for her, she was prevented by a film contract from playing it. She appeared in her last film, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), with Henry Fonda, while suffering from cancer, and during her fatal illness she was planning to appear again on the stage.
Alice Brady's life was one of frequent illness and bad luck, faced with courage. Alice died of cancer in New York City on October 28, 1939. She was only 46 years old. Her body was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York.
Robert Garland wrote about her: "Acting honors go to Miss Alice Brady who, after all these years, has come into a part worthy of the talents which have long been hers. "
Connections
In May 1919 Alice Brady married James L. Crane, an actor in her Forever After company. She was divorced from him in 1922. A son, Donald Crane, survived her.