“Why this distinguished actress and pillar of New York society should choose to exhibit herself in this passing fad of moving pictures is beyond my reasoning. She has, undoubtedly, done her career in the legitimate theatre irreparable harm.”
(Charles Frohman, 1896)
Most film historians record Florence Lawrence, a nineteen-year-old actress from Hamilton, Ontario, as being the first motion picture performer to be named alongside the movie title as its star. That was in 1909, when the fast growing motion picture industry gave in to public pressure and told the world the name of the actress millions only knew until that time as the “Biograph Girl.”
In fact, thirteen years earlier, another Canadian, May Irwin, had her name on posters advertising a fifty-second film, The Kiss, a scene from the Broadway hit play, The Widow Jones.
In 1896, no reputable actor or actress would acknowledge having been inside the primitive film studios of the era. But May Irwin changed all that when she yielded to the pleas of the motion picture camera inventor, Thomas Edison, to give “a real professional performance” for the benefit of the struggling industry. Until that time, all film actors were rank amateurs, more often than not people grabbed from the streets near the studios.
On June 26, 1896, May Irwin and John Rice, both appearing on Broadway in the Charles Frohman comedy, The Widow Jones, stood in front of a camera on the roof of a warehouse on 28th Street in New York City and recorded the kiss scene from the play.
The plump and jolly Irwin and aging Rice played a part in the birth of the film industry that is still on record in the United States film archives in Washington, D.C.
When the film was shown publicly two weeks later, Charles Frohman was very displeased. “I shall have to consider replacing Miss Irwin,” he told the New York newspapers. But one week later he was talking to the film’s producer, Edson Raff, pleading that future advertising for the Vitascope short should contain the words: “Starring the distinguished actress, May Irwin, now appearing in the Charles Frohman comedy on Broadway, The Widow Jones.”
What had changed Frohman’s mind? The standing ovation given to May Irwin on her first entrance each night at the theatre. “There are hundreds waiting at the stage door each night to catch a glimpse of her,” reported the New York Times.
May Irwin
May Irwin, born June 27, 1862, in Whitby, Ontario, went on to much greater fame in a stage career that spanned fifty years. But only once again did she step in front of a film camera. In 1914, at the height of her stage acclaim, she made a two-reel film, Mrs. Black Is Back, for the Famous Players Corporation, a company in which Charles Frohman was a major stockholder.
“I was too old then for a film career,” she told the New York Times when she officially retired from the stage in 1925. “How I wish I had been born thirty years later. I think I would have enjoyed working before a camera.”
Her grandchildren recalled some years ago that she never tired of reading, to any member of the family who would listen, a critical review of her 1896 film debut. The writer was Herbert S. Stone, editor and publisher of a literary magazine, The Chap Book. Stone denounced her as follows: “It [the scene] is an outrage to decency and good taste. Neither participant [in The Kiss] is physically attractive and the spectacle of their prolonged posturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear. When only life size on the theatre stage it is beastly. Magnified to gargantuan proportions on a white sheet it is absolutely disgusting.”
May Irwin’s successful stage career deserves more space than this brief story of her film fame. Possibly that can be done in a later book about the many Canadians who played major roles in the growth of the New York stage.
She married happily and became a wealthy woman. When she died, in 1938, she donated much of her money to theatrical charities. On the day of her funeral, New York theatres turned off their marquee lights for one minute as a tribute to her accomplishments and generosity. Obituaries did not forget her early role in motion pictures.
Riverside Memorial Chapel, in New York City, was packed with the elite of the theatre world to pay tribute to her career. Among those present were Raymond Massey, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Ruth Gordon, Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence, Lucile Watson, Orson Welles, Mary Martin, and Ethel Barrymore. They broke into the traditional theatre response, spontaneous applause, when the Rev. John Merrithew reminded them that she should surely be described as “the mother of the motion picture industry.”
The Kiss was not forgotten forty-two years after it was filmed. Thousands of enthusiasts of the era of silent movies still remember it today.
