Right now, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Cera, Jim Carrey, Seth Rogen, Elliot Page, Rachel McAdams, Finn Wolfhard, Sandra Oh and Ryan Gosling are just a few of the Canadians making their mark in Hollywood.
As we travel farther back in time, we come across even more Canadians.
People like John Candy, Leslie Nielsen, Christopher Plummer, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Margot Kidder and Donald Sutherland.
Almost every generation of actors has Canadians that made an impact.
Hollywood itself owes a debt of gratitude to Canada.
From the very beginning Canadians have been there
As Macleans stated in the 1930s,
“From the very beginning, when the first motion picture to be made in California was given its humble birth, Canadians have been important in picture making. When the first camera was set up and the first foot of film ground out, a Canadian prepared the screen story, a Canadian designed the set, a Canadian cast the picture and directed it.”
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx
Canada was an early adopter of film.
In the autumn of 1897 as the motion picture industry dawned, a farmer from Manitoba named James Freer bought film equipment from the Edison Film Company.
He was inspired by the new technology and wanted to capture farming life.
Called Ten Years in Manitoba, the film was simply a compilation of scenes, featuring men working in a wheatfield, farmers harvesting a crop, a train passing over the prairie and the arrival of the CPR Express at Winnipeg.
One scene was of a man staking grain on his farm.
That man happened to be Thomas Greenway, premier of Manitoba at the time, and possibly the first politician to ever appear on film.
The Canadian Pacific Railway saw the potential of film as propaganda to attract immigrants to settle in Canada’s West.
The company arranged for Ten Years in Manitoba to be showcased in the United Kingdom in April 1898 to encourage people to move to the Canadian Prairies.
As the 20th century dawned, Canadians looked to this new industry not just for creative pursuits and as a way to express themselves, but also as a way to make money and become famous.
One of the first Canadians to venture into movies was Florence Lawrence.
Born in Hamilton in 1886, she made her film acting debut in 1906 in The Automobile Thieves produced by the Vitagraph Film Company.
The film was a success and led Lawrence to act in another 38 films with the company before joining the Edison Manufacturing Company, another film company.
Her star quickly rose, and she became the world’s first true movie star.
While at Vitagraph she met a young actor, who was looking for “a young, beautiful equestrian girl” to star in a film to be produced by the Biograph Studios.
She eventually moved over to the studio where she earned the nickname of The Biograph Girl for her work as one of the leading ladies in silent films for the company. With it came more fame.
Throughout the early 1910s, she worked and made upwards of $500 per week.
Her upward trajectory ended while filming Pawns of Destiny in 1915 when a stage fire got out of control, and left Lawrence with severe burns and a fractured spine from a fall cause as she escaped the inferno.
While she recovered from her injuries, she spent months away from filming and when she returned, she was dealing with PTSD. Through it all the studio refused to pay her medical bills.
Her popularity declined throughout the 1920s as she dealt with personal losses including the death of her mother in 1929.
Poor business decisions cost her much of her fortune and then the stock market crash in 1929 further depleted whatever savings she had left.
In the early 1930s, her acting work was mostly as an extra. Times were tough and they were soon to be calamitous.
On Dec. 28, 1931, she called in sick to work later that day, she ingested ant poison and cough syrup to end her life.
While her life ended tragically, her name lives on as a Canadian who helped make early films popular.
Around the same time Florence Lawrence’s star rose to fame, the Christie Film Company began to put out comedies from their studio in Hollywood.
But the birth of that company can be traced back to April 13, 1882, when Charles Christie was born in London, Ontario followed by his brother Alfred on Nov. 23, 1886.
From an early age, both boys were exposed to the theatre.
Their father operated the Opera House in the city, while their mother was the box office manager.
Charles was an exceedingly bright boy, who graduated school at 14, and by the age of 16 had completed a four-year accountancy course in two years.
When he was 23, he was offered a job as a stage manager for a theatre company and only agreed to take it if his brother Al was hired as well and for the next three years the brothers worked for the company.
Charles was then hired by the Nestor Film Company, which opened the first movie studio in Hollywood in 1911.
Since his brother was working with the company, Al wrote comedy strips and sold them to Nestor for $15.
For the next four years, the brothers worked for the company and built-up experience in the burgeoning film industry.
With that experience, they formed the Christie Film Company on Jan. 6, 1916.
Al Christie wanted their film studio to make both westerns and comedies, but Charles, being the older and wiser brother, convinced him to focus only on comedies.
This proved to be the right decision because Christie Comedies became known for fast-paced slapstick movies that were very successful as future silent movie stars got their start with the studio including Harold Lloyd whose scene in the 1923 film Safety Last which sees him hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street with dangerous and risk exaggerated camera angles is considered one of the more enduring images in cinema.
The Christies also gave Black actor Spencer Williams, later known for his portrayal of Andy Brown in the Amos & Andy” CBS Television series, one of his first breaks into the industry. Macleans wrote,
“Al Christie is now among the foremost of those men who have devoted their lives to the creation of laughter. While he is one of the most stolid citizens of the parish, commodore of the Los Angeles Yacht Club and regarded by his fellow citizens as one of them, Mr. Christie still regards the Ontario city as his home.”
Throughout the 1920s, the Christies made successful films, including their first sound film or talkie with the 1929 Dangerous Females.
That year alone, the studio produced 50 feature-length sound films.
But then came the Stock Market crash in October 1929 and with it, financial worries because the brothers had several bank loans to help them produce films.
With the Great Depression upon them by 1932, they were $2.5 million in debt.
Even after they liquidated all their assets, they were still short $70,000 so they paid of the remainder of the company’s debt themselves.
If you think that kept the brothers down… you would be mistaken Al established another film studio in 1932 and made 32 films until 1941 when he retired from the film industry.
By the time Al retired, the brothers had produced over700 films. He died from a heart attack ten years later on April 14, 1951. He had only $2,597 in his bank account which came from his brother Charles, who had fared a bit better financially thanks to his accounting background.
Charles died on Oct. 1, 1955 and gave his housekeeper of 30 years $250,000 along with his house but in a sad post-script to this story, she was killed in a car crash only three months later.
Another important studio head was born in Canada, a few years after the Christie Brothers.
Jack L. Warner was born in London, Ontario on Aug. 2, 1892. The family only stayed for two years in Canada before they moved to Baltimore, and eventually Ohio.
In 1905, Jack and his brothers Harry, Albert and Sam began ventured into film production, and then film production.
With his brothers, Jack founded Warner Brothers, one of the most important studios in film history in 1923.
Four years later, Jack and his studio ushered in the age of the talkies with the release of The Jazz Singer. This marked the end of the silent film era, and the beginning of the sound era for Hollywood.
For the next five decades, he helped shape Hollywood and its Golden Age era. His film studio helped launch the career of actors such as Errol Flyn, Humphrey Bogart and James Gagney.
Jack Warner died on Sept. 9, 1978. He has been honoured extensively for his 55 years leading Warner Brothers, including with a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.
While Florence Laurence and the Christie Brothers laid the groundwork Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford cemented Canada’s foothold in the film industry and forever changed Hollywood.
Mack Sennett was born in Danville, Quebec in 1880.
As a young adult, he lived in the northeast United States, where he became an actor and moved to New York City where he worked as an actor, singer, dancer, clown and set designer.
His experience in the theatre brought him to the attention of the Biograph Company where he directed films and as an actor he has the overlooked distinction of playing, albeit as parody, Sherlock Holmes 11 times between 1911 and 1913.
After his short-lived acting career, Sennett founded Keystone Studios in California.
With financial backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman of the New York Motion Picture Company the studio featured the first completely enclosed film stage ever constructed and if you go to Echo Park where it’s located you can see it as it still stands in 2023.
Keystone Studios gave birth to the careers of some of the most important actors in early Hollywood, including Raymond Griffith, Bing Crosby, W.C. Fields and the one and only Charlie Chaplin.
Dubbed the King of Hollywood’s Fun Factory, Sennet produced slapstick comedies with car chases and pies to the face all seen in his most famous comedy series… the Keystone Cops.
These films were based on a formula with humorous situations, rather than a specific trait of the performers, who were mostly interchangeable.
He said in 1915:
“Having found your hub idea, you build out the spokes. Then introduce complications that make up the funny wheel.”
In 1917, Sennett gave up the Keystone trademark and organized his own company Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation.
Throughout the 1920s his movies were in great demand but as talkies arrived with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the popularity of slapstick movies began to wane although he had minor successes as the 1930s dawned.
In 1932, Sennett was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, regardless… much like the Christie Brothers, Sennet’s studio wouldn’t survive The Great Depression, and he made his last film in 1935, a Buster Keaton movie called The Timid Young Man.
Mack Sennett went into semi-retirement at the age of 55, having produced more than 1,000 silent films and several dozen talkies during a 25-year career.
In March 1938, Sennett was presented with an honorary Academy Award: “for his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen, the basic principles of which are as important today as when they were first put into practice, the Academy presents a Special Award to that master of fun, discoverer of stars, sympathetic, kindly, understanding comedy genius – Mack Sennet
Sennett died on Nov. 5, 1960 and the building of Sennett’s original studio in Echo Park was deemed a historical landmark by The City of Los Angeles in 1982
Another pioneer in the US film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades was Mary Pickford.
She’s considered to be one of the most famous Canadians in history, and the biggest star of the silent era next to Charlie Chaplin.
Often called American’s Sweetheart, she was born on April 8, 1892, in Toronto, Canada as Gladys Marie Smith.
When she was six, her father John, who had already abandoned the family, died from a head injury after a fall while working on a Niagara steamship.
Her mother Charlotte began to rent a room to a stage manager from the Cummings Stock Company of Toronto to bring in extra money.
As it turned out, this renter changed the future of the entire family.
The manager suggested to Charlotte that her daughters would be perfect for the stage.
And in 1898 Pickford made her stage debut with the Valentine Stock Company in the film Bottle’s Baby.
Just a year later in 1900, she performed at Toronto’s Princess Theatre, in The Silver King where she played the parts of a boy and a girl, while her mother played the organ for the production.
Before long, she began to land more roles in Toronto stages.
In 1907, when Pickford was 15, the family joined the David Belasco Theatre Company. This is when Belasco suggested that Gladys change her name to Mary Pickford, a combination of her middle name and her grandfather’s middle name John Pickford Hennessey.
That same year, she landed a supporting role in The Warrens of Virginia, a play written by William DeMille, his brother Cecil B. DeMille, was also a member of the cast.
By 1909, motion pictures were taking the world by storm.
So, Pickford pivoted to the new medium and landed her cinematic debut in Her First Biscuits, which was directed by D.W. Griffith.
She was offered $5 per day whenever he needed her to be in a scene.
Pickford declined and asked for more quote.
“I am an actress and an artist, and I must have a guarantee of $25 a week and extra when I work extra.”
While she didn’t get what she asked for she got $10, double the usual for the time.
Pickford said,
“I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities. I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I’d become known, and there would be demand for my work.”
Unlike many actors at the time who treated movies like plays, she knew how to play for the camera. She did this by fusing realism with the balletic gestures of silent films, creating intimacy between herself and the viewer.
She soon signed with the Biograph Company and landed her first starring role in The Violin Maker of Cremona, also directed by Griffith and released in 1909.
With each new film, audiences and critics saw Pickford, who was just over five feet tall, dominated the screen in the feisty characters she played.
At the time, actors were not listed in the credits but as people noticed Pickford, the company capitalized on it by advertising her roles on sandwich boards, calling her “The Girl with The Golden Curls” and “Blondilocks” or “The Biograph Girl”. This was the same name given to Florence Lawrence, but as Pickford took over as the biggest female star in the world for the company, she gained the nickname.
In 1911, she left The Biograph Company, her last picture with them was The New York Hat and moved to the Independent Moving Pictures Company, which later became Universal Pictures in 1912.
With her star on the rise, she married Owen Moore, a silent film actor.
The same year she left Biograph and a year later she made her return to Broadway in 1912’s A Good Little Devil.
William De Mille said:
“She can’t be more than 17 and now she’s throwing her whole career in the ashcan and burying herself in a cheap form of amusement. There will never be any real money in those galloping tintypes. Say goodbye to little Mary Pickford. She’ll never be heard of again.”
He was wrong. Very wrong because she soon realized that she deeply missed film and this detour on the stage only inspired her return to Hollywood.
In 1913, she began to work with Famous Players, which would become Paramount Pictures.
She acted in several films from 1913 to 1914 including In The Bishop’s Carriage, Caprice and Hearts Adrift which made her extremely popular with audiences. That would inspire her to ask for a pay raise.
Released five weeks after Hearts Adrift, her next film, Tess of the Storm Country, saw her name above the title, and it sent her career into overdrive.
With film she became not only the most popular actress in America, but the world.
By 1916, only Charlie Chaplin surpassed Pickford in popularity.
Both Chaplin and Pickford enjoyed fame far beyond anything other actors in Hollywood could imagine.
One silent film journalist wrote:
“The best-known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history. “On June 24, 1916, Pickford signed a contract that paid her $10,000 per week, or $213,000 today.
This new contract, signed with Adolph Zukor, one of the three founders of Paramount Pictures. gave her full authority on the production of the films she starred in. She was also entitled to half of a film’s profits, with a guarantee of $1,040 or $22,000 today.
Having full control was important for Pickford, who said:
“So many things can ruin fine work.”
The contract did not come without a cost.
Her friend, director, DW Griffith was outraged and said that he made her career and without him she would vanish.
He also said he would make actress Mae Marsh bigger than Pickford.
Since you’re a history fan you know that didn’t happen.
One rumoured reasons Pickford stopped working with Griffith was that he asked her to flash her legs while she was wearing a caveman costume in a film, which she refused to do.
For most of her career, Pickford dictated the path her career would take, and she wasn’t done yet.
Just as she thought her career was reaching its zenith, new heights were yet to be reached and an undeniable legacy to be forged.
After all, America’s Sweetheart was about to change filmmaking forever.
Typically, Pickford portrayed orphans looking for a paternal figure, which often ended up becoming a romantic figure.
She was often cast in the role of a child, despite being a grown woman and because she never had a normal childhood, she didn’t mind playing the role which was helped by her short stature.
Pickford’s stature and fame for playing young women caused the public to act strangely around her when they saw her. Once, after a manicure, a child saw her in public and said:
“Mama, she’s not a real little girl. She has long fingernails.”
From this point, she clipped her nails short.
Another time, a man stared at her for two minutes and then, said:
“You may have the face of an angel and the heart of a devil. If you have, I pity you. If you haven’t, I pray for you.”
Even when Douglas Fairbanks’s son met her, he assumed she was a boy and a new playmate for him. When he asked if she would play trains with him, she happily did.
In 1917, Pickford began an affair with Douglas Fairbanks when they toured together to promote Liberty Bond sales for the war effort.
During the First World War, she routinely campaigned for the war effort, including selling one of her trademark curls for $15,000. In a single speech in Chicago, she sold an estimated five million dollars’ worth of bonds.
While the curls Pickford sold in the war effort were really hers, if you’re a lucky fan that has a Pickford ringlet in your collection, you might not have the real deal.
Many of the curls sold over her career came from sex workers or others in need, and then built into hairpieces for her ringlets. Each curl cost $50, a huge amount at the time, and Pickford travelled with a suitcase full of curls for sale.
Meanwhile Fairbanks was a major star in his own right, known for his roles as a swashbuckling hero in silent films such as The Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood and the Mark of Zoro. Like Pickford, he was married at the time the affair started.
In 1919, with Fairbanks, Chaplin, and DW Griffith, Pickford formed United Artists. Through this new company, she could produce and perform in her own movies and distribute them in a way she liked.
With United Artists, she released Pollyanna in 1920, which grossed $1.1 million.
That year, Pickford divorced Owen Moore, who was verbally abusive to her.
Days after her divorce was finalized, she married Fairbanks.
Upon her marriage to Fairbanks, they moved into a mansion in Beverley Hills that they named Pickfair.
At the time, they were the most glamourous couple in Hollywood.
When they went on a trip to Europe for their honeymoon, they were mobbed by fans.
They left New York on June 12, 1920 on a Red Star cruise liner.
When they arrived in London, the New York Times reported:
“Arriving in London, the pair were mobbed to such an extent that they had to spend one weekend at Lord Northcliffe’s place in the Isle of Thanet and another at one of the country seats of the Duke of Sutherland.”
Fairbanks then hired an Italian driver to chauffeur them throughout Europe.
They visited the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and were honoured with a dinner in Paris that was attended by 200 of the country’s most prominent actors.
The marriage was called the marriage of the century, and they were referred to as the King and Queen of Hollywood.
The couple’s fame was such that when foreign heads of state came to see the president at the White House, they asked if they could go to Pickfair to meet the couple.
At Pickfair, the couple hosted Charlie Chaplin, the best friend of Fairbanks, as well as Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, Amelia Earhart, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Babe Ruth, among many others. Will Rogers said that his biggest job as the mayor of Beverly Hills was to direct tourists to Mary Pickford’s house.
Working in the cutthroat film industry Pickford remained steadfast in her resolve and used her influence to promote causes dear to her heart.
In 1921, Pickford co-founded, and served as the first vice president, of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, to help those in the motion picture industry who were out of work and struggling.
Throughout her career, Pickford was highly charitable.
On every set she worked on, she hung a bucket and asked everyone working to donate money to help others in the industry who had no work.
In 1927, Pickford and Fairbanks were the first stars to make their hands and feet imprinted in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
She also became one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, now known as the Academy Awards.
Like most movie stars of the silent era, Pickford found her career fading as talkies became more popular among audiences. At first, she was dismissive of them saying:
“Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus De Milo.”
While the world changed around her in 1928, Pickford lost her mother to cancer.
A year later she played a reckless socialite in 1929’s Coquette, her first talkie, a role for which her famous ringlets were cut into a 1920s bob.
The public didn’t know she had previously cut her hair in the wake of her mother’s death, so her fans were shocked at the transformation, and it made the front-page of The New York Times and other papers.
Regardless, Coquette was a success, and she received the Academy Award for Best Actress.
This made her the first Canadian to win an Academy Award.
While Coquette was a hit, her next film, The Taming of the Shrew, released in October 1929, was a flop.
She went on to film Forever Yours in 1930, but it was never released. Pickford had spent $300,000 on the film but was unhappy with the quality and had all negatives destroyed.
She was in her thirties, and no longer able to play children, teenage spitfires, and feisty young women her fans adored, and she wasn’t suited for the glamorous and vampish heroines of early sound.
So, audiences failed to connect with her following film Kiki in 1931 and it was another flop for Pickford.
So, she took a break from acting until 1933, when she appeared in Secrets. and then effectively retired from film as it proved to be her final major role on the silver screen.
She said:
“I left the screen. The little girl made me. I wasn’t waiting for the little girl to kill me.”
She returned to Toronto, Canada in May of 1934, where she was given an official civic reception, and huge crowds jammed the streets of the city to see her.
She was given a gold Centennial medal, and, in her speech, she said:
“I am proud to be a Canadian.”
In 1936, Pickford separated from Douglas Fairbanks citing infidelity.
Despite the divorce, Douglas Fairbank’s son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stated that Pickford and his father long regretted their inability to reconcile. Fairbanks died only three years later.
And Pickford married Buddy Rogers a year after her divorce and adopted his two children Charles and Roxanne.
She remained married to Rogers for the rest of her life.
While she no longer acted in films, Pickford kept busy.
She set up Mary Pickford Cosmetics, co-founded the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers and the Mary Pickford Charitable Trust.
The money she made allowed her to fund film projects as a producer, including One Rainy Afternoon and Love Happy with the Marx Brothers.
In 1943, her family home was demolished in Toronto and most of the bricks were delivered to Pickford in California.
The proceeds from the sale of the property were donated by Pickford to build a bungalow in Toronto.
The bungalow was then made the first prize in a lottery to benefit war charities and was unveiled on May 26, 1943.
Through it all, Pickford and Charlie Chaplin remained partners in United Artists for decades until 1955 when Chaplin left the company.
Pickford departed a year later, selling her shares for $3 million, or nearly $30 million today.
During her career she proved to be a savvy businesswoman, and prudent, she often saved up to two-thirds of her income so by the time her acting was well behind her she had a net worth estimated to be $40 million, or over $200 million today.
She also owned many of her early silent films, her intention was to have them burned upon her death.
As she aged, she became more of a recluse and struggled with both alcoholism and depression, so she rarely made public appearances. She only welcomed Lillian Gish, a fellow actress, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and a few other people.
She said:
“It would be unfair to the woman I was. Why should I try to compete with the beauties of today?”
In 1955, she published her memoirs named Sunshine and Shadows.
By the mid-1960s, she only received visitors by phone, speaking to them from her bedroom.
Her husband Bobby gave tours of Pickfair, which included a western bar she had bought for Douglas Fairbanks, and a portrait of Pickford that is now in the Library of Congress.
Two decades after she pledged to destroy her films after her death, she chose to reverse her earlier wishes in 1970 and instead she agreed to donate 50 of her Biograph films to the American Film Institute.
Thus, preserving her most important films for future generations.
Six years later, she received a lifetime achievement Academy Award now known as Oscars.
She did not attend the ceremony and only accepted it via video from Pickfair.
As the end of her life neared, Pickford contacted the Canadian government to verify that she was still a Canadian citizen, despite her long residency and marriages to American men. In her words, she wished to die as a Canadian.
On May 29, 1979, Mary Pickford died in Santa Monica, California and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
Over the course of her life, Pickford acted in roughly 200 short and feature films. She won two Academy Awards and as of 2009, two of her films have been added to the National Film Registry.
While Mary Pickford’s legacy is untouchable there are two other Canadian Hollywood pioneers you should also know about Norma Shearer and Marie Dressler
Mary Pickford was the first Canadian to win an Academy Award but wouldn’t be the last because she was quickly joined in the record books by two others.
From 1929 to 1931, the Academy Award for Best Actress was won exclusively by Canadians, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer and Marie Dressler.
Norma Shearer was born on Aug. 11, 1902, in Montreal.
Living a life of privilege, she attended high school in the city where she became interested in music and acting.
Her happy childhood in luxury came to an end in 1918 when her father’s company collapsed and the family moved into a modest house, leading Shearer to commit to finding success and escaping poverty.
In 1920, she moved to New York City where she tried out for the Ziegfeld Follies but was turned down by Florenz Ziegfeld, who called her a dog and criticized her eyes and legs.
Not good enough for the Follies she took roles as an extra throughout before landing her first major film role in The Stealers, released at the end of 1920. In the film she played Julie Martin, the daughter of the main character Reverend Robert Martin, played by William H. Tooker.
Despite the role in The Follies, she struggled to find work until 1923 when she was offered a contract by Louis B. Mayer Pictures. This was a relatively small studio run by Louis B. Mayer, another Canadian in the film industry.
Mayer was born in Russia, but grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick. In 1907, he moved to America to start a theatre career. A decade later, he started his small studio.
That small studio merged with two others in April 1924, becoming MGM. This helped launch not only the career of Mayer, but also Shearer in the process.
Shearer’s ascension came quickly as she starred in, He Who Gets Slapped, which was a considerable box office success.
By 1925, Shearer was headlining her own films and earning $5,000 per week.
In the span of two years later she had made 13 silent films for MGM, all of which were hits.
With the advent of talkies in 1927, she was able to transition easily into the new medium thanks in part to her brother, Douglas Shearer, who was instrumental in the development of sound at MGM and took good care to prepare her for the microphone.
Her first picture, The Trial of Mary Dugan in 1929, was a considerable success.
A year later, she starred in The Divorcee, for which she earned the Academy Award for Best Actress.
That same year, she was nominated for another Academy Award for her role in Their Own Desire.
A year later, in 1931, she earned her third Oscar nomination for A Free Soul.
By 1934, she was called the First Lady of MGM.
And she wasn’t done with the Academy because she earned Oscar nominations in 1934, 1936 and 1938, becoming the first actor to receive five or more nominations in their career.
In 1939, she was up for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but she had no interest in it.
She officially retired from acting in 1942 and slowly withdrew from Hollywood life.
Her secretary said in 1960,
“Miss Shearer does not want any publicity. She doesn’t talk to anyone. But I can tell you that she has refused many requests to appear in motion pictures and TV shows.”
Norma Shearer died on June 12, 1983.
Alongside Norma Shearer was fellow Canadian Marie Dressler.
She was born on Nov. 8, 1868, in Cobourg, Ontario and by the age of 14 she left home to make a living with traveling theatre troupes where she discovered she had the ability to make people laugh.
She put the humour aside and focused on her singing and after some time with opera companies, she made her debut on Broadway in 1892.
While she hoped to become a dramatic actor, her friend Maurice Barrymore convinced her to focus on comedy.
By 1893, she was making $50 a week on Broadway. Seven years later she tried to make it on her own with a theater troupe, but it quickly went bankrupt.
In 1904, she signed a three-year $50,000 contract with Weber and Fields Music Hall management and once that contract ended, she began to perform in vaudeville while also bank-rolled various theatre productions on Broadway, to mixed success.
Her first major break in the movie business was in 1914 with Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which was a play she owned the rights to. She cast Charlie Chaplin in the movie to be her leading man, helping to launch his career.
She said she was quote:
“Proud to have had a part in giving him his first big chance.”
A quick note…. This would be the last film Chaplin did not direct or write.
As Tillie’s Punctured Romance went into production Dressler was 44 years old, and Mack Sennett, remember him? He convinced her to co-star with Chaplin in the first full-length screen comedy.
The film proved to be a huge success and was shown in theatres for years through the silent film era.
She filmed two sequels to the movie before returning to Vaudeville in 1918.
By the 1920s, acting roles dried up and announced her retirement from show business shortly after.
Then, in 1927, she was offered a role by her friend Allan Dwan, another Canadian, in the film The Joy Girl which was an early colour film.
It revived her career, and she entered the business of show once again.
That same year, Frances Marion, a screenwriter, was working on a film for MGM and remembered how Dressler had shown her kindness during the filming of Tillie Wakes Up in 1917 when she was just getting into the industry.
To repay her, she had Dressler cast in the film, The Callahans and the Murphys.
The film was a success and allowed Dressler’s star to shine in Hollywood.
As the industry transitioned into the sound era, Dressler had no trouble adjusting to the new climate.
In 1930, she signed a $500-per-week contract and continued to act in popular comedies.
By 1931, she was one of the top actors in Hollywood.
That same year, she acted in Min and Bill, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was nominated again in 1932 for her role in Emma.
In 1933, she had several hits including Dinner at Eight and Tugboat Annie and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.
Grateful for her late-career resurgence, everything ended abruptly when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM and yet another Canadian in Hollywood, took charge of her health and took care of him at his home, ordered her not to travel and arranged experimental cancer therapy.
She died on July 28, 1934.
Her career spanned more than 40 films, and she wrote two autobiographies.
The story of Canadians in Hollywood is a long one, too long for a single episode.
I feel that our impact on the film industry is best summed up by a story from Charles Foster, an American in the Royal Air Force in the First World War.
He visited Hollywood near the end of the war where he met Sidney Olcott, a Toronto born director who made films, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1908.
Foster was then taken to meet Mary Pickford at her home, followed by a tour of MGM Studios, where Louis B Mayer spoke with him. Then he had tea with Norma Shearer, and Mack Sennett then took him on a drive.
By the end of the day, he was sitting with Jack Warner, another Canadian and head of Warner Brothers, and Canadian Fay Wray, who would find fame in King Kong, as well as other Canadian actors Walter Pidgeon, Deanna Durbin, and Fifi D’Orsay.
No matter where Foster looked, he ran Canadians who were cementing themselves in Hollywood.
These pioneers led the way for future Canadian stars such as Donald Sutherland, William Shatner, Jim Carrey, Ryan Reynolds, Rachel McAdams, Anna Paquin, John Candy and Catherine O’Hara.
