Constance was born on April 19, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York. She was the youngest daughter of Margaret L. and Frederick Talmadge. Fred Talmadge worked at various makeshift jobs, usually vaguely connected to the entertainment industry, and often disappeared from his family for long stretches at a time. The major responsibility for raising their three daughters lay with Margaret ("Peg") Talmadge, who sold cosmetics, took in laundry, gave art lessons, and rented out the hall bedroom.
Constance attended P. S. and, briefly, Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.
She went into film with little formal education and no previous stage experience. Peg, determined to better her family's condition, resolved to encourage her daughters to develop whatever talents they had. She was loudmouthed and pushy, but she got all her daughters started in show business. After wangling a job for Norma, the oldest, at the Vitagraph Motion Picture Studio in Flatbush, Peg pushed Constance, in 1914, into the movies at Vitagraph, which was one of the most successful of the vanguard companies. Here Constance worked as an extra for $5 per day. (In her heyday, she commanded $5, 000 per week. ) Known as the Vitagraph Tomboy and given the nickname "Dutch, " for two years she appeared opposite Billy Quirk in many comedy shorts. Her vivacious personality and spontaneous wit made her very popular at the studio and spilled over into her performances. Connie had no lines to memorize; mime and exaggerated facial expressions carried the plot.
Joseph M. Schenck, Norma's husband, created the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation, and then the Constance Talmadge Film Corporation, both located in the same building in New York City. Connie's company produced such films as A Pair of Silk Stockings (1918); A Virtuous Vamp (1919), which Vachel Lindsay, in a review in The New Republic, called "a gem"; Dulcy (1923); and The Goldfish (1924), in all of which she gave sparkling comedic performances. Many of these farcical comedies were written by the popular collaborators Anita Loos and John Emerson, who under contract were to have the final say over each picture before it left the studio. This husband-and-wife team successfully transferred Connie's unique allure to the screen. Schenck's shrewd management guided the sisters until they moved to Hollywood in 1921.
Connie was soon a success on the West Coast. Her big break came when she was given the part of the spirited mountain girl in the Babylonian episode of D. W. Griffith's gargantuan historical spectacle, Intolerance (1916), one of Hollywood's most extravagant films. It was this role that revealed her natural talent for comedy. In one scene, as she drove a chariot wildly through the streets to warn the Babylonians, she munched on a fistful of scallions. Her exuberant performance justified Griffith's confidence in her and launched her on a highly successful career.
She was soon a leading star, a position she held throughout the 1920's, the golden age of silent cinema. Although Constance never reached the heights of stardom that Norma did, there was never any rivalry between the sisters, who remained close all their lives. Norma, the tragic heroine, and Constance, the comedienne, were stars before they were twenty. Natalie acted briefly, in only a handful of films; she ran her sisters' fan clubs and handled general secretarial duties. In 1916, the year she did Intolerance, Connie played opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Matrimaniac. When her contract with Fine Arts expired, she worked mainly for Select Pictures Corporation.
Lewis J. Selznick, head of Select, capitalized on her flair for light comedy by starring her in eight high-class five-reel comedies while she was still in her teens. When it was rumored that she might leave Select, for whom she worked from 1917 to 1919, she received offers from practically all the major movie producers. The lowest financial remuneration offered was double the salary she had been receiving.
From 1919 on, she was one of the mainstays of First National. Connie starred in Her Night of Romance (1924) and Her Sister from Paris (1925), both wacky farces directed by Sidney Franklin, with Ronald Colman as the male lead. In the latter, Connie played a dual role as both a neglected housewife and her glamorous sister from Paris.
She never played in the talkies. She endorsed numerous products, from aspirin to a grand piano, once posing for 400 testimonials in one day.
Constance Talmadge died in Los Angeles.
Connie was at five feet six, with golden hair and expressive brown eyes heavily outlined with dark lashes.
Connie was engaged many times, to Irving Thalberg, Irving Berlin, and John Charles Thomas, among others, and married four times. She had no children. Her first marriage, to a New York tobacco importer, John T. Pialoglou, on September 26, 1920, lasted one year. Connie sued him for divorce because he wanted her to give up her career in films. Shortly after, Connie married Captain Alastair MacIntosh, a British aviator and heir of a Scottish laird; they were divorced in 1927. Her third marriage, to Chicago department store tycoon and playboy Townsend Netcher, lasted from May 1929 to January 1939, when she divorced him on grounds of desertion. In October 1939 Constance married Wall Street stockbroker Walter M. Giblin; this marriage lasted until Giblin's death in 1964.
1869–1925
1870–1933
He was a Greek tobacco importer.
1901–1964
1893–1955
She was an American silent film actress who was best known as the wife of Buster Keaton.
She was an American actress and film producer of the silent era.
She was an American screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for her blockbuster comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
