Marie Dressler

^ Not unlike Miss Lansbury.

If the etiolated George Arliss can get an Oscar; so can this frump.

She makes me look young.

She was one of MGM's biggest money making stars along with Crawford, Garbo and Harlow at the height of their beauty so a true case of talent is beauty.

Is Louise Dressler related to Marie Dresser?

She seems frumpy and plain more than fug. She may live.

I adore Marie Dressler. Fuck off OP. That's no way to introduce a talented artist.

This Dressler woman can only be seen in 4 or 5 films. All the others are rotting away in nitrate-dungeons.

[quote] a true case of talent is beauty.

OK, R3, I guess that aligns with John Keats' thoughts that "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty —that is all"

[quote]She was one of MGM's biggest money making stars along with Crawford, Garbo and Harlow at the height of their beauty so a true case of talent is beauty.

You can be both

Here she is with Charlie Chaplin, in all her glory

She's no Edna Mae Oliver!

*Edna May Oliver

She sucked my cock twice a week for years.

There’s a great You Must Remember This podcast about her. Fascinating life and a huge success in her day. She was on the cover of Time magazine

R4 Read the poster -- it was Louise [bold]Dresser[/bold], no "l."

Marie was beloved by everyone on the MGM lot, even Garbo.

She manages to make you believe in Dinner at Eight that when she was a young actress she was a great beauty.

She made an enormous amount of money at MGM...great home in BH. And she was a lesbian, to boot.

Wry talented actress - there’s no way anyone like her today could achieve her level of fame and success.

May she come to you in the middle of the night, OP, and smite you with the jaw bone of an ass!

I don't know why, but people always asked me if she was a Lesbian.

Now THAT was a smelly pussy!

Marie was in that society film, dir. George Cukor, “The Women” or was it “Dinner at Eight”? She had more than one incredible exchange with Carole Lombard. It’s been so long I just can’t remember the details now... sorry.

I think she's adorable. Need more like her.

R22 It was Jean Harlow. But she also has a great exchange with Elizabeth Patterson, the future Mrs. Trumball, little Ricky's babysitter who had secret show biz aspirations. Patterson indicates that she saw Dressler on the stage when she was a little girl which makes Marie rather indignant with a great punchline about the civil war.

Sorry, it was dinner at eight, look up jean harlow mariedressler dinner at eight

I just can’t figure out how to link one page to datalounge page. Sorry.

If all Miss Dressler would be remembered for is that brief exchange she has with Jean Harlow at the end of "Dinner at 8," it would be enough to rank her as a fine comic actress: The small half-step back, the 'accountant's stare' and the inimitable line, "Oh my dear, that's something you'd never worry about." ( no 'esprit d'escalier' needed) Each is perfection, and, taken together, truly memorable.

I love her "reading a book?" double take. I always think of that when I'm on the subway and I see a young person actually looking at a book rather than their phone. Timeless material. Thanks George S. Kaufman!

Dressler was in despair in the mid 1920s over her inability to get any acting work. Her friend Frances Marion got her into some MGM silent pictures, and she gradually got better parts. Her long stage experience proved useful when sound pictures came in. Her performance in 1930's Anna Christie, with Garbo, led to numerous other roles over the next four years, until her death in 1934.

Dressler had a long career on stage, then enjoyed her biggest fame in films shortly before her death.

Talent is talent. Beauty is beauty.

She scored one out of two, which is more than most of us.

1920: Marie Dressler

2020: Chrissy Metz

My favorite scene from Dinner at Eight. I loved Marie Dressler.

This is better, an actual clip from the movie.

frumpy = wide face, loose jowls, specialised in played poor females

Who is her 2020 equivalent? Probably Dame Maggie Smith or some other venerable Brit.

Dame Maggie Smith has been performing for 60 years. Dressler can only be seen in 4 or 5 films. All the others are rotting away in nitrate-dungeons.

There was some biography of Greta Garbo that was chock full of inaccuracies and lies. One of its claims was that Marie Dressler and Greta Garbo had an affair. It quoted Garbo as saying "She taught me not to be ashamed of this kind of love." Now...does anybody believe THAT happened? I seriously doubt it did. The author of this biography also said Garbo had a fixation on oranges. Yes, oranges. I don't believe that, either.

r37 That's very odd indeed about Garbo's supposed orange fixation. I'd have thought she would've had her fill picking baskets of them down on the fjords, when she was a child.

Live and learn.

R37 Everything about Hollywood is 'full of inaccuracies and lies'. It is an industry manufacturing fantasies.

R36, Dressler also had a long distinguished career when in old age she landed in the roles that brought her to a wider audience.

The analogy to Maggie Smith is very apt.

The story of her late-in-life rise to fame would make a fun movie.

She was more beautiful than most ever will be. Where counts.

Pretty.....

Pretty ugly and pretty apt to stay that way.

I love Tillys Punctured Romance, and I love her in her later successes, Tugboat Annie, Min and Bill, and Dinner at Eight.

She was a force, a brilliant actress, and a huge star....as so often on DL, the OP has no idea what he's talking about.

Marie was delightful in "Min and Bill" and "Emma." She may not have been a looker, but she had charisma.

[quote] charisma.

Kate Hepburn had more charisma.

She stole every scene she was in in "Dinner at Eight."

"I think I knew your father" (looks at her brooch) "I did."

"Thank god I don't have to go to one of those dreadful dinners!"

"Now aren't you ashamed?!"

[quote] "I think I knew your father" (looks at her brooch) "I did."

I don't what that is supposed to imply.

The father years ago gave the brooch to Dressler but he took it back and now he gave it to the floozie?

[quote] She manages to make you believe … that when she was a young actress she was a great beauty.

Do you similarly believe that when Shirley Booth was a young actress she was a great beauty?

She was no less an attractive woman than most of the comedic actors of today are attractive men. John Goodman? Will Ferrell?

OP is an ass.

Dressler was a great gal, and the immoderate language of a "Oh, a fat old-time woman!" queen would have gotten your ass kicked by Jackie Cooper.

R50 Booth is fantastic and if she ever played an older actress who had been a beauty in her youth, she could have made you believe it.

But she never did.

Dressler did play that part.

I’m unfamiliar with her but I’m gonna rip a new hole into her films today!

She was exquisite.

A few years back I toured her family home in Cobourg, Ontario.

I’m really not sure why it needs to exist.

[quote] And she was a lesbian, to boot.

What proof do you have of that?

She sure was homely

Dressler's biographers interpret her relationship with Clare Dubrey as lesbian.

Marie Dressler is among those actors featured in the Canadians In Hollywood stamp series. Others include Mary Pickford, Lorne Greene, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray.

She should have had Thelma Ritter's agent to make her part bigger in "Anna Christie"! She was great in that, too! I don't know if they have fjords in Sweden, btw, where Garbo was from -- Norway certainly has them.

I don't know if they show them much anymore, but TCM has shown virtually all the Marie Dressler sound movies, except for "Christopher Bean" (1933), which is indeed locked away in an archive, due to copyright issues of some kind.

BTW - have you old film addicts been to Nitrateville.com? That's where you'll find people who know EVERYTHING about classic films.

[quote]Marie Dressler is among those actors featured in the Canadians In Hollywood stamp series. Others include Mary Pickford, Lorne Greene, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray.

Did they forget me?

Deanna, you saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy back in the Great Depression, and they still haven't named a fucking building or street after you on their lot! Plus they still haven't released the wonderful "Spring Parade" on DVD!

I'm stealing this ugly trophy, bitch

[quote]Dressler's biographers interpret her relationship with Clare Dubrey as lesbian.

So there is NO proof.

There almost never is "proof" of sexuality from the early 20th century, except when the figure makes a declaration themselves. However, it is known that many people were closeted.

However, Dressler in her own time was often described as a lesbian and socialized with a lesbian circle. She was also known to have intense female relationships to the end of her life and only had known sexual relationships with men early in her life, a pattern that is common among lesbians who come to terms with their sexuality later in life.

From Betty Lee's book on Dressler:

Despite her well known alliance with Sunny Jim, in fact, there have been frequent rumors and conjec-tures as to whether Dressier was a lesbian, perhaps allowing this long-suppressed characteristic to surface after the humiliating ex-perience with Dalton. Biographer Antoni Gronowicz has intimated that Dressier had a sexual liaison with Greta Garbo. But the writer loses credibility by ignoring Garbo's better-documented affair with social dilettante Mercedes de Acosta as well as those she is known to have had with writer Salka Viertel and Swedish aristocrat Count-ess Ingrid Wachtmeister. Besides, Garbo herself insisted she had never met or talked to Gronowicz. Certainly Dressier enjoyed, even preferred, the company of women—particularly after Dalton's death—and many of them were openly lesbian.

She was a confidante of New York's famous "bachelors," Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe as well as Anne Morgan and her lover, Anne Vanderbilt, the second wife of the late Will-iam K. Vanderbilt. Mercedes d'Acosta was also a friend and so was openly lesbian social arbiter Elsa Maxwell. During the actress's years as a Hollywood celebrity, she was constantly in the company of gay men (including actors Ramon Novarro and William Haines), all of them eager for her friendship and approval. The actress's in-timate association with astrologer Nella Webb could easily be in-terpreted as a lovers' alliance. So could her close-knit relationship with Claire Dubrey. Not surprisingly, there is no hint of lesbian-ism in Dubrey's disarmingly frank memoir, though she never hides the fact that the friends always shared a room whenever they trav-eled together. Other astute observers of the Hollywood scene, such as biographers Donald Spoto and Charles Higham, say there has never been any evidence that Dressier was known in the movie com-munity as a lesbian, though they also admit that this kind of sexual behavior was seldom the subject of gossip at the time. However, composer David Diamond, who spent many years in the Holly-wood of the 1930s, insists that Dressier was known as an active lesbian and was friendly with other well known lesbian actresses such as Thelma Todd and Patsy Kelly. In any case, it is easy to believe that the bulky, sixty-year-old Dressier and the slimly attrac-tive, thirty-five-year-old Dubrey must have appeared as something of an Odd Couple, even to the sophisticates of Santa Barbara.

Love her.

[quote]There almost never is "proof" of sexuality from the early 20th century

Yeah

[quote] Other astute observers of the Hollywood scene, such as biographers Donald Spoto

R68 That man is a charlatan. You are ill-advised to mention that person in your posts.

John Goodman in drag as Linda whatever Trip?

Um, R71, Spoto was not mentioned in a post. His name appears in a quote from, Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star, by Betty Lee, University Press of Kentucky.

But the quote does say that Spoto says there is no evidence of Dressler being reputed to be a lesbian---which does seem unlikely (whether she was a lesbian or not, butch women at that time almost always faced rumors).

So as you say, Spoto is not reliable...and this seems to be just another case where he has an agenda that keeps him from acknowledging the obvious.

Plenty of other biographers to talk about.

in addition to her marvelous acting career, Marie helped found the first stage chorus union in 1919, and acted as their first President. It merged with Actors Equity in 1955.

She's a right broad.

Dressler is what you would call well built. Metz is fat fat fat.

She could pass without much notice as "a woman if sturdy stock" but for those organ meat lips...

She could pass without much notice as "a woman if sturdy stock" but for those organ meat lips.

[quote] … organ meat lips…

Are you alluding to a musical instrument or a vagina?