Gertrude Howard (1892-1934) was, like so many Black women, restricted to a limited range of acting opportunities, and most frequently cast as maids. This did, however, bring her screen immortality of a kind, as she played the maid to whom Mae West uttered the line “Beulah, peel me a grape” in I’m No Angel (1933).
After some stage work, Howard made her first film in 1925. In 1931, she played a servant in MGM’s The Prodigal.
Howard, who was described in 1927 as the highest-paid “colored actress” in Hollywood, died at only 41, and Mae West helped fund her funeral.
Susanne Ransom (1925-2010) lived to a good age and spent a few years of it as a child actor in Hollywood.
Ransom made her debut in Madonna of Avenue A (1929), directed by Michael Curtiz, and her last appearance just eight films later, in All This, And Heaven Too (1940).
In 1930 she made a rare credited appearance in The Prodigal.
Walton Algernon Albright Jr (1925-99) appears to have been a Hollywood child actor who came out of the experience unscathed and went on to have a productive life outside show business.
Albright made his screen debut aged 3 and had notched up over sixty appearances by the age of 15. He had a handful of roles as an adult, but also pursued other interests. In 1957, he won a title at the National Water Ski Championships in the Trick category. He also ran a successful trucking business.
In 1931, Albright appeared in MGM’s The Prodigal. A few years later he was part of Our Gang for half a dozen pictures. He also featured,as a teenager, in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), playing the boy at the migrant camp who pretends his family eats chicken.
Julius Theodore von Eltz (1893-1964) was a typical Hollywood workhorse. In more than 200 pictures spread over 40+ years, he evolved from silent leading man to character actor to bit-part player, always giving of his best in whatever he did.
Eltz made his stage debut aged 19, appearing on Broadway a number of occasions, and made his first film in 1915. Probably his best-known and most frequently revived role was as Arthur Geiger, the bookseller, pornographer and corpse in The Big Sleep (1946).
Eltz was in two MGM musicals in the 1930s. He played the caddish Carter Jerome in The Prodigal and, six years later, was uncredited in The Firefly.
It seems indisputable that Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (1902-85) was and remains the most problematic performer in Hollywood history. As Stepin Fetchit, he played the ultimate caricature of the lazy, incoherent Black man, earning and losing a million dollars in the process. He was American cinema’s first Black star, before Sidney Poitier, before even Hattie McDaniel.
To many observers, both now and at the time, Fetchit was an embarrassment, an enabler of the worst kind of stereotyping by white filmmakers. To others, he can be seen as a talented and intelligent performer who was knowingly satirizing white attitudes. This was certainly Fetchit’s own understanding of what he was doing.
Fetchit’s achievements are undeniable. By the time he appeared in The Prodigal, he was the most popular Black actor in Hollywood and the first to receive featured billing. He was the first to obtain a long-term contract with a major studio. In six years, from 1929, he appeared in 26 pictures. His studio, Fox, publicized his extravagant lifestyle, his expensive suits and bevy of Chinese servants.
Donald Bogle represents Stepin Fetchit as a highly-gifted performer who consciously developed a character that would both delight and not threaten white audiences. Fully aware of the injustices his characters experienced, he creates them as beings so far removed from reality that they cannot be demeaned by their treatment: his characters were “inhabitants of detached, ironic, artistically controlled worlds”.
Ironist or not, Fetchit could not outrun the Civil Rights Movement and his work opportunities declined, though John Ford, a friend, gave him one last opportunity to shine in, fittingly, The Sun Shines Bright (1953). As the servant Jeff, Fetchit is the character who holds Judge Priest to his course and is the moral centre of the film.
Emma Dunn (1875-1966) was a British stage actor who travelled to the USA and worked extensively on Broadway. Her 1906 appearance in the first American production of Peer Gynt (1867), playing the protagonist’s mother despite being twenty years younger than the other actor, was typical of the way Dunn was frequently cast older than her actual age.
Dunn’s first screen appearance was in Muraice Tourneur’s Mother (1914), in which she recreated, silently, a role she had originated on Broadway. She made only a couple more silent pictures, but found plenty of work after the introduction of sound.
Dunn continued to play many mothers, including Jean Arthur’s in The Talk of the Town (1942) and Dr Kildare’s multiple times in the MGM series. She also played Mrs Jaeckel in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1941).
Emma Dunn was mother to the uxorious Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal, and ten years later played Mickey Rooney’s mom in Babes on Broadway.
Her final role was as Alexis Smith’s old nurse in The Woman in White (1948).
ZaSu Pitts called her a ferret. Katharine Hepburn kicked her in the backside, while Joseph Cotton pulled away a chair as she was sitting down. Joan Bennett sent her a skunk on Valentine’s Day. Elda Furry (1885-1966) was not the most popular person in Hollywood.
And understandably so. As one of the town’s two demon gossip columnists (with Louella Parsons), Hopper became far too influential than might be hoped for a right-wing racist, and she helped to destroy many people’s lives and careers, not least as a cheerleader for the blacklist during the HUAC years.
Prior to her career in yellow journalism, Hopper had been an actor, initially on the stage and in Hollywood from 1923. She made around 120 appearances, none of them memorable, and amongst which were parts in two MGM musicals: The Prodigal and Flying High. A few years later, her career in the doldrums, Hopper took up the poison pen. Subsequent acting roles were generally offered to keep her on side, and most of later appearances were playing herself (something she did less effectively than Helen Mirren in Trumbo [2015]).
Purnell Busch Pratt (1885-1951) had a strong bass singing voice and ambitions to perform in opera. This didn’t work out for him, which must have given him mixed feelings when he appeared alongside Lawrence Tibbett in The Prodigal.
Pratt did, however, appear on the Broadway stage, including as a regular member of George M Cohan’s troupe. He made a couple of films for New York companies before his career was interrupted by the First World War, but began his run of well over a hundred appearances in 1925. He was always a supporting player, normally in a credited role. He was the focus of the interpolated scene in Scarface (1932), in which, as a newspaper publisher, he makes a censor-required speech condemning gangsterism. He also played Captain Wood in DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936).
In addition to his featured role as the loathsome Rodman in The Prodigal, Pratt was uncredited in two other Metro musicals: A Night at the Opera, as the mayor welcoming the ‘aviators’, and Rosalie.
Esther Louise Worth (1902-94) was the youngest child in a family vaudeville act before starting her film career while a teenager. She was only 22 when she played Mrs Darling in the Betty Bronson version of Peter Pan (1924).
Ralston starred in dozens of films during the 1920s and made a successful transition to sound. But her career faltered, and in her autobiography, published in 1985, she asserted this was the work of Louis B Mayer, whose advances she had resisted. In a familiar story, he ensured she was greylisted at the major studios.
Ralston’s final leading role was in Henry Hathaway’s To the Last Man (1933), though she continued acting, mostly on the stage and in television, until the 1960s.
Ralston was very good as the female lead, opposite Lawrence Tibbett, in MGM’s The Prodigal.
