Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses

Mignon Anderson

MIGNON ANDERSON She was a sad little creature, one might almost say pathetic, as unworldly as many of the ingenues she had played at the Thanhouser Company in the early teens. She lived in a small apartment, almost across the street from Warner Bros., a studio that had not existed when she was a leading lady. The world scared and confused her, and she was genuinely shocked that she was living next door to a young man and a woman who were not married to each other. One of her leading men at Thanhouser had been James Cruze, who went on to direct The Covered Wagon (I923) and Old Ironsides (1926). While at Thanhouser, he gave Anderson the nickname of "fillet mignon." Cruze was engaged to marry actress Betty Compson, and the two would give riotous and drunken parties that continued until all involved had collapsed. Mignon Anderson was a guest at one such party, arrived early, and was invited up to Compson's room while she readied herself for the evening. To poor little Mignon's anguish and discomfort, Compson entertained her with bawdy stories while sitting, nude, at her dressing table. Surprisingly, Mignon Anderson, for all her innocence, was born into a theatrical family-in Baltimore, Maryland, onMarch 31, 1892. Herfather, Frank Anderson, was reasonably prominent on stage until his death in 1914, and he found roles for his daughter with a number of legendary theatre personalities, including Richard Mansfield, Julia Marlowe, and Joseph Jefferson. As Mignon recalled for me, "I started posing for clothes, and I met people who were working in the picture business, who were also posing for clothes. I was invited to go to the Thanhouser Company and meet Mr. Thanhouser, because in those days, Iwas supposed to look like Mary Pickford-I really didn't. That's what the Thanhouser advertised me as, The Second Mary Pickford.' Istarted right in, and I was put under contract, and stayed with them for six years." Founded in 1910 by theatrical entrepreneur EdwinThanhouser-"He was German, you know, and very tight about money," commented Mignon-the Thanhouser Film Corporation (the "Th" was pronounced "F") was located in New Rochelle, New York, and remained in existence through 1918. None of its films are particularly memorable. Some are very bad. A couplefrom I9I6, The World and the Woman and Fires of Youth, starred Jeanne Eagles in her first screen role. Mignon Anderson's most spectacular film for the company was The Mill on the Floss, released in December 1915, in which the flood sequences easily steal the production away from Mignon and her fellow players. Anderson had been engaged to actor Irving Cummings, but when her family discovered he was Jewish, and his family discovered she was a gentile, 4 Mignon Anderson there was mutual outrage, and the engagement was called off. In 1916, Mignon married a fellow Thanhouser player, Morris Foster, and the couple left the studio to join Ivan Productions, created by Ivan Abramson. Abramson specialized in exploitation films, and Mignon Anderson starred for him in The City of l/Jusion (1916), playing a Southern aristocrat who almost ruins the lives of both her husband and her lover. In January 1917, Anderson moved on to Universal. where she worked with various directors, including two of its most prominent female filmmakers , Lois Weber and Ida May Park. By 1918, the actress had left Universal, and for the remainder of her relatively short career she worked as a freelance player. She made her last screen appearance, Kisses, for Metro in 1922. At the end of her career, she was not paid too badly, earning $250 a week, compared to the weekly stipend of $50 that another pioneering actress, Ethel Grandin, was earning at the studio at that time. Mignon retired, and Morris Foster gave up acting and spent 17 years in the wardrobe department at Paramount. He died on April 24, 1966, and Mignon died, in Burbank, California, on February 25, 1983. :Bibliography Holmes, Harriet. "Winsome Mignon Anderson, the Little Dresden China Girl." Photoplay, November 1913, pp. 59-60. "Mignon Anderson's Career." Moving Picture Stories, June 29, 1917, p. 24. ...