Zeffie tilbury biography sample

  • Zeffie Tilbury (Mrs LD Woodthorpe)
  • Download this stock image: Miss

    • Proof That It’s Pre-Code

    • Sexed up grandmas looking for love in all the wrong places. “Continental men are my weakness.”
    • Uh, it’s about… war. And radio. And stuff. I got nothin’.

    The role of a lifetime! Or about ten minutes.

    The Never Ending Battle

    “Radio controlled battleships and submarines would have won the first World War within a year!”

    I’m going to start this review off with an embarrassing story. When I was in high school, I sat down and tried to watch Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. Now here’s the kicker: I couldn’t. Why? I couldn’t tell a single damn one of said angry men apart.

    12 Angry Men is a tight little drama about twelve white men all in one room for about ninety minutes, and that’s about all I can remember about it. Nowadays I could easily pick out Henry Fonda or Martin Balsam, but back then they just blended together. I guess all old white men just look the same to me.

    That’s the same issue I found in Mystery Liner, which involves a great number of men who look identical, talk identical and look identical. Did I mention that one already? The biggest name in the cast is Noah Beery(who shouldn’t be confused with his brother Wallace by any means), and he’s in exactly two scenes in the whole picture. I guess with star talent like that, they have to hold back a bit.

    I do like that the film's shorthand for Grannie's son being a ninny is the wrinkled copy of Detective Comics he keeps on him at all times.

    There are two women in the picture. One’s a pretty young nurse (Astrid Allwyn, a better name than actress) who falls in love with whatever handsome beau is left standing when the curtains fall. The other is Grannie Plimpton (Zeffie Tilbury), an unceasing horndog who is playing Rose to the titular mystery liner’s rendition of Titanic.

    Not that the ship manages to go down, mind you, it’s just

  • Photograph of Zeffie Tilbury as Clotilda

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    Photograph of Zeffie Tilbury.

    Photography was a novel and exciting development in Victorian days. Most actors and actresses had studio photographs taken, in everyday dress or theatrical costume, for ‘cartes de visite’, and later ‘cabinet cards’. Both were albumen prints made from glass negatives, attached to stiff card backing printed with the photographer’s name.

    ‘Cartes de visite’, the size of formal visiting cards, were patented in 1854 and produced in their millions during the 1860s when it became fashionable to collect them. Their subjects included scenic views, tourist attractions and works of art, as well as portraits. They were superseded in the late 1870s by the larger and sturdier ‘cabinet cards’ whose popularity waned in turn during the 1890s in favour of postcards and studio portraits.

    This photograph comes from a large collection of ‘cartes de visite’ and ‘cabinet cards’ removed from their backings and mounted in albums by Guy Tristram Little (d.1953) who bequeathed them to the V&A. A collector of greetings cards, games and photographs, Guy Little was a partner in the legal firm Messrs Milles Jennings White & Foster, and the solicitor and executor of Mrs. Gabrielle Enthoven, whose theatrical collection formed the basis of the Theatre Collections at the V&A.

    Object details

    Categories
    Object type
    TitleGuy Little Theatrical Photograph (named collection)
    Materials and techniques

    Sepia photograph on paper

    Brief description

    Photograph of Zeffie Tilbury as Clotilda in Pluto, or, Little Orpheus and his Lute by H.J. Byron, reworked from his burlesque Orpheus and Eurydice,Royalty Theatre, 26 December 1881. Guy Little Collection.

    Physical description

    Sepia photograph of Zeffie Tilbury.

    Dimensions
    • Height: 9.0cm
    • Width: 5.6cm
    Marks and inscriptions

    'Zeffie Tilbury / Daughter of Lydia / Thompson'

    Note
    Written on back of photograph in pencil.

    Object history

    This is one of the o

    Camille

    She was a legendary Russian-born stage performer who studied with Stanislavsky, popularized the works of Ibsen and Chekov, and achieved acclaim as the first “modern” actress in the American theater. She became the highest-paid film actress of her era, and was also a true auteur with unprecedented control over scripts, directors and co-stars. Yet by the time she died in 1945, Alla Nazimova was all but broke, playing only occasional supporting roles, and living in a bungalow on the grounds of her former palatial estate. Nearly forgotten for 50 years, Nazimova was brought to vivid life in a 1997 biography by Gavin Lambert, who sorted out the dramatic facts from the myths, which he called “fictions less strange, and less compelling, than the truth of her life.”

    Nazimova was born Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon in Yalta in 1879, into a family of Sephardic Jews. She endured a Dickensian childhood with an abusive father who had divorced his flighty, unfaithful wife when Alla was six years old. Nazimova studied drama at Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. Later, she joined the theater company of famed actor-producer Pavel Orlenev, touring Europe and, in 1905, going to the United States. The troupe performed in Russian to immigrant audiences. One of the first reviews, in the New York American, was prescient: “We could not understand the language of the play, but the language of Alla Nazimova is universal. It is the language of the soul. Her name will be a household word.” In 1906, Nazimova accepted a contract with impresario Lee Shubert which gave her the right to choose her own material. Her first two plays were both by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, and both did well. For her third, Shubert convinced her to try a frothy comedy. Over the next decade, she would alternate between challenging works by Ibsen or Chekov, and lightweight comedies or lurid melodramas.

    In 1915, with Europe at war, Nazimova accepted the lead in the pacifist play, W

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