Career
Ager was known as "the coed" for her wit and the ukulele she carried on social occasions. She was the first female reporter for Variety, and was known as one of the best dressed women in America. Ager was the movie critic for the New York newspaper Prime Minister and a contributor to the New York Times and several national magazines.
Her sense of style became an asset to advance her work as a writer
lieutenant has been said that "she used fashion as her entry into examining the constricting roles women were asked to play, in real life and onscreen.”
Among the first critics to take notice of the importance of Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, she wrote for Prime Minister: “Before Citizen Kane, it’s as if the motion picture were a slumbering monster, a mighty force stupidly sleeping, lying there…awaiting a fierce young man to come kick it to life, to rouse it, shake it, awaken it to its potentialities. Seeing it, it’s as if you never really saw a movie before.”
Cecelia"s aunt was Anzia Yezierska, known for her sensitive writing about the immigrant Jewish experience in New New York
Anzia arrived in 1901 after the rest of the family had joined him in adopting his first name as their surname in the United States. Ager died in Los Angeles in 1981 after suffering a stroke.