Item Info

Publication Date: 2/26/1914
Media Type: House Organs
Source: Theatre Collection
Notes:

Lubin’s Famous Players: Ormi Hawley

   

“The American Beauty of Filmdom” is only one of dozens of similar titles bestowed by her admirers upon Ormi Hawley. The three years she has spent in photoplay have brought the celebrated Lubin star a following which girdles the globe. In Japan she is known by her loveliness and in South Africa and Russia she is acclaimed the American of surpassing comeliness. 

Miss Hawley’s personality overshadows the charm of her acting, for no matter how great an effort she makes to be judged by her histrionic ability alone her beauty remains supreme. Her profile is purely classic, its perfection calling to mind the faultless regularity of a coin or medal of ancient Greece. 

To her screen admirers Miss Hawley’s attractiveness is a thing of lines and contours. They do not know that her eyes are of a clear, soft grey and that her hair is the color of dull gold. Her bewitching voice they do not know, nor her laugh, nor the appealing womanliness of her. 

Miss Hawley’s birthplace is Holyoke, Massachusetts, and it was from there that she set out a few years ago to accept her first engagement on the stage. After a short stock experience she was noticed by Mr. Lubin who immediately decided that his great studio in Philadelphia must enlist the promising young actress. Accordingly to Lubinville she came, she saw, and the picture world was conquered. 

Nearly three hundred roles have been created by Miss Hawley, embracing every form of expression from the modern melodrama of the underworld to the sheerest fantasy. Scores of the photoplays which gradually gave prestige to the Lubin trademark were cast with Ormi Hawley in the lead, and she added to them the unquestionable advantage that always accompanies a beautiful woman in the eyes of the public. 

In everything she undertakes Miss Hawley earnestly strives to do better work than she has ever done before. She has long since wearied of reading and hearing of her physical advantage over most actresses, and dreams of the day when she will be rated for her versatility, her power to create character — in short, for her acting alone. And every day she is nearing that distinction. 

Some of the noted leading men of the screen world have played opposite Miss Hawley, chiefly Arthur V. Johnson, Harry C. Myers, Edwin August and Edwin Carewe, and many authors have written stories around her. None, however, has been so successful in providing her with a congenial role as in “Madeline’s Christmas,” which H. A. D’Arcy wrote expressly for her talents as an emotional artist. 

Another player might lay stress on the fact that she had made her start as a leading woman and had never played anything less important, but such is not Miss Hawley’s disposition. She is unaffected and democratic, with ann estimation of her gifts and position which falls far below their true value. She is carelessly generous, and finds delight in surprising her intimates with gifts of originality and appropriateness, or, dashing up in her motor, she darts into the home of someone who perhaps needs a breath of the park, drags her willing captive to the chugging machine and in a flash they are off for a spin. The mortal is yet to be found who can refuse anything to the “Opulent Ormi!”

Call Number: Lubin - Bulletin I:9