Obituary: Mary Philbin

Mary Philbin, actress: born Chicago 16 July 1903; died Huntington Beach, California 7 May 1993.

MARY PHILBIN is remembered now for just one film, but she was Universal's leading female star of the late Silent period. That film was The Phantom of the Opera (1925), once the subject of an angry debate in the House of Commons. As a result it was banned.

Under its founder, the unadventurous Carl Laemmle, Universal coasted along on a series of unimportant programme pictures, staking a claim to be still considered a major studio by producing one superproduction once or twice a year. One of these was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which had starred Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. It made him a star and the films he subsequently made for MGM an even bigger one. Laemmle, furious at letting Chaney get away, cajoled him to return to play another grotesque, also taken from a 19th-century French novel. The Phantom of the Opera concerned a man, Chaney, so horribly scarred that he lives hidden away in the catacombs of the Palais Garnier, his lonely existence brightened when he conceives a passion for Miss Philbin, an understudy preparing to sing Marguerite in Faust.

The film's success in the US exceeded Laemmle's wildest expectations, so that his London office arranged for the cans containing it to be met at Southampton dock by a brigade of His Majesty's guards. Whether it was escorting or protecting them on their journey to the station was discussed in Parliament; and no one was publicly admonished for the 'loan'. But the upshot was to ban the film so that Universal could not benefit from the publicity. (When finally seen in 1929 with the added sound sequences it was not a success.)

Mary Philbin was one of the several stars of the period who came into films via a beauty contest. She entered one in 1920 in her native Chicago and came second - but among the judges was Erich Von Stroheim, then a very big wheel at Universal. He was then about to direct Foolish Wives (1922), also playing the lead, a lecherous cavalry officer on the loose in Monte Carlo. He gave her a walk-on as a girl on crutches crossing the road, while planning to star her with himself in his next film, Merry-Go-Round (1923). Unfortunately, he was a while in starting it and Universal, having acquired Philbin's services, had been slotting her into their other films since The Blazing Trail in 1921.

She played the lead in that, but in most of the others was merely decorative. Nor did Merry-Go-Round reveal any real histrionic ability, but she was pretty as an organ-grinder in the Prater in Vienna who is pursued by a dissolute count. Irving Thalberg, Laemmle's second-in-command, refused to let Von Stroheim play the role, and, in the event, replaced him (because of his extravagance) after some weeks' shooting. The first reel, is promising, with Philbin and Norman Kerry - as the count - doing their most distinctive screen work; but neither is very interesting in the material directed by Rupert Julian.

Julian also directed Phantom of the Opera, the peak of Mary Philbin's career, but she followed it with another prestigious picture, Stella Maris, a remake of Mary Pickford's much-loved 1918 vehicle, playing a dual role - that of an impoverished cockney girl and a rich, beautiful cripple, both in love with the same man. DW Griffith borrowed her for one of his later, lesser efforts, Drums of Love (1928), a story of sexual passions among the aristocrats of 19th-century Latin America, but in fact an updating of the story of Paolo and Francesca.

Universal continued to show faith in her by starring her in the first films of their newly-imported, highly expensive German directors, Paul Leni and EA Dupont. Leni's The Man Who Laughs (1927) was an attempt to equal the success of the two Chaney films. Philbin played a blind girl loved by her childhood sweetheart, a circus clown, who dare not propose in case she regains her sight and is horrified by his warped lip. The role was played by Conrad Veldt, whom the studio hoped would supplant Chaney as Hollywood's master of horror. Neither the public nor Veldt liked the idea. Leni's The Last Performance (1929) was a conventional murder mystery in which Veldt was an illusionist and Philbin his assistant. Leni died not long after its completion and Veldt returned to Germany, as did Dupont after just the one film, Love Me and the World is Mine (1928) - which was the antithesis of the gritty Variete, which had made his reputation.

The Last Performance was issued, in both Silent and Part-Talkie versions, to complete audience indifference; and when no warmer response greeted two further Philbin films she retired, just another victim of the Talkie revolution. She was a pretty girl, pleasant to see, if not remotely in the same class as Swanson, Garbo or Gish.