John KampfeFort Lee, Home, Movie History, New Jersey Movies, New Jersey Profiles

Part 3 of a 5-Part Series

When the movie studios came to Fort Lee in force beginning in 1910, they brought with them many actors, actresses and those behind the cameras who would go on to achieve fame for decades to come.

The Barrymores — Ethel, John and Lionel — who were considered acting royalty during Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s all spent parts of their early film careers in Fort Lee.

“Ethel worked for Metro out of Solax, Lionel as a player in the Biograph Griffith company — he made many films here, and John for Artcraft at Paragon (Studio),” noted Tom Meyers, Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission. “And their father Maurice lived in Fort Lee for the last 10 years of his life though he was a stage actor and died before the film industry came here.”

Maurice Barrymore’s home stood until 2004 behind the old Rambo’s Hotel in the Coytesville section of town.

Lionel, the oldest of trio, was the most prolific with more than 220 acting credits and an Academy Award as Best Actor in 1931 for his portrayal of “Stephen Ashe” in A Free Soul. But he is perhaps best known for the role of “Mr Potter” in the beloved holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Ethel, the middle child, was the most decorated with her own Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1945 for None But the Lonely Heart as well as three more Academy Award nominations in the same category over the next five years. She also was nominated once for an Emmy. John had 65 acting credits on his resume.

Among those joining the Barrymores in Fort Lee during its silent film heyday were actors Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Theda Bara, Adolphe Menjou, Frank Morgan, Mabel Normand, Warner Oland, Mary Pickford and Pearl White, according to Richard Koszarski’s anthology, Fort Lee: The Film Town. Directors who plied their craft in the Bergen County community included D.W. Griffith, Raoul Walsh and Mack Sennett.

“Some actors and actresses lived in Fort Lee but others like Theda Bara lived (in New York City) and would take the ferry over to New Jersey every day,” Meyers explained. “It was rough in the winter time.”

While most of the actors and actresses went on to gain various degrees of fame after Fort Lee, Bara and White were two actresses who achieved stardom during those Fort Lee days. Bara is credited with being filmdom’s first sex goddess. Her sultry, dark looks propelled her to stardom and brought a new persona to the silver screen — the “vamp.”

“Theda Bara was a huge star and a completely new phenomenon, a mass-produced celebrity instantly familiar to millions of people through the images seen on the screen,” the Fort Lee Film Commission noted on its website. ” … Bara made more than 40 pictures (for Fox). She played Solome, Cleopatra, Juliet, and Madame Dubarry.”

While Bara was exciting audiences on one level, White was doing so on another as the heroine in movies featuring the towering Palisades as a key element from which the term “cliffhanger” was coined. The “cliffhanger” genre got its name from the plot line where a movie villain would subject the film’s hero and/or heroine to all sorts of perils at the edge of the Palisades. White’s signature role was as “Pauline” in Jersey City-based Pathé Studio’s The Perils of Pauline serial in which the Palisades were prominently featured.

“Pearl White had arrived in New York in 1910, tired of theatrical life on the road and looking for something more stable and secure,” Koszarski wrote in Fort Lee: The Film Town. “She tried the movie studios, working for Powers, Crystal and Pathé in one-reel comedies and melodramas. The Perils of Pauline (1914) marked her triumphant return to Pathé and Director Louis Gasnier.”

But White was a reluctant damsel in distress. White wrote in an amusing 1919 memoir excerpted in Fort Lee: The Film Town that she initially jumped at the chance to star in the serial until she began reading the fine print of the contract.

“The farther into the contract I got the worse things looked for me,” she wrote, “and when I got to the clause ‘the party of the second part, being of age, takes her part in this motion picture play at her own risk, and in case of accident or loss of life she and her relations have no claim for damages against the party of the first part’, etc., etc., I was all for leaving this offer stand and getting back to New York as fast as the street car would take me.”

But Gasnier managed to convince White to take the plunge (pun intended) and, as she put it in her memoir, “I signed what I thought was probably my death warrant.”

White related: “In these first three episodes I had to play tennis, which I could not. I had to take flight in an aeroplane, which I didn’t like much, because it was supposed to crash to the ground in a wreck; then I had to drive a motor car through water, fire and sand. This also didn’t sound reasonable. Then I had to go out to sea in a yacht, which was all right, only that I was to jump overboard just as the boat was blown up by a villain, and I couldn’t swim …”

But White acclimated well to spending her workdays exposed to real-life dangers while making movie magic for her devoted audience.

“I have actually gotten to like fear, and like the sensation of taking some very dangerous chances that frighten me,” White wrote. “My old heart beats a ragtime, and I face the music feeling more thrilled than I would be doing something in which I knew there was no risk.”

Next: Fort Lee’s Star Fades Quickly

Click here to read Part 1: Hollywood? Fort Lee Once was Heart of Movie Industry

Click here to read Part 2: Filmmakers Went All-in with Fort Lee