Margaret Mayo | |
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| Born | Lillian Elizabeth Slatten November 19, 1882 Brownsville, Illinois, United States |
| Died | February 25, 1951 (aged 68) Ossining, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Playwright, screenwriter, actress |
| Spouse | Edgar Selwyn |
Margaret Mayo, born Lillian Elizabeth Slatten, [1] was an American actress, playwright, and screenwriter.
She was raised on a farm near Brownsville, Illinois. Later, she was educated at the Girl’s College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin; the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Salem, Oregon; and at Stanford University. [2] In her teen years, she traveled to New York City to pursue an acting career. She won a small part in a play named Thoroughbred at the Garrick Theatre.
She met her future husband, fellow actor Edgar Selwyn, in 1896. The same year, she began her writing career. [3] She and Selwyn married in 1901.
She worked as many things: adapter, actress, film company founding partner, playwright, and a writer. Until about 1917, Mayo averaged about a play per year. [2] Her earliest successes were adaptations of novels: The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) and The Jungle (1907). However, Mayo is best remembered as the author of more original plays such as Polly of the Circus (1907), Baby Mine (1910), Twin Beds (1914), and Seeing Things (1920), written with Aubrey Kennedy. Her work utilized parody and satire to talk about social issues. [2]
She adapted several of her plays for the silent screen. Her play Polly of the Circus became the first film produced in 1917 by the Goldwyn Company, of which she was a founding member. [4] After a year as head of the scenario department, she left to go overseas and entertain the troops. [3]
In 1919, Mayo and Selwyn got divorced. Afterward, Mayo changed her name to Elizabeth Mayo[ why? ] and moved to New York to live with her mother. [3] In 1926, she signed the Agreement of American Dramatists, a document that led to the foundation of the Dramatists Guild. [2] She also began selling real estate.
As she got older, she began to write about the spiritual world. [3] Mayo was instrumental in making housing arrangements for Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba at Harmon, near New York City, during his first visit to America in 1931. She owned and provided the stone house retreat where he stayed on this trip. [5] [6]
Margaret Mayo died on February 25, 1951, in Ossining, New York. She is buried in St. Francis of Assisi Cemetery in Mount Kisco, New York.[ citation needed ]
Goldwyn Pictures Corporation was an American motion picture production company that operated from 1916 to 1924 when it was merged with two other production companies to form the major studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was founded on November 19, 1916, by Samuel Goldfish, an executive at Lasky's Feature Play Company, and Broadway producer brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, using an amalgamation of both last names to name the company.
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
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Regina M. Anderson was an American playwright and librarian. Influenced by Ida B. Wells and the lack of Black history teachings in school, Anderson became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Maude Fealy was an American stage and silent film actress whose career survived into the sound era.
Edith Taliaferro was an American stage and film actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was active on the stage until 1935 and had roles in three silent films. She is best known for portraying the role of Rebecca in the 1910 stage production of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Jennifer Howard was an American stage and film actress active between the mid-1940s and early 1960s. She appeared in a number of classic television shows during the American Golden Age of Television and was also an accomplished watercolor and acrylic artist. She was the daughter of the playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard and first wife of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr.
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Polly of the Circus is a 1932 American pre-Code MGM drama film directed by Alfred Santell and starring Marion Davies and Clark Gable.
Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Edgar Selwyn was an American actor, playwright, director and producer on Broadway. A prominent figure in American theatre and film in the first half of the 20th century, he founded a theatrical production company with his brother, Archibald Selwyn, and owned a number of Selwyn Theatres in the United States. He transferred his talents from the stage to motion pictures, and directed a film for which Helen Hayes received the Academy Award for Best Actress. Selwyn co-founded Goldwyn Pictures in 1916.
Polly of the Circus is a 1917 American silent drama film notable as the first film produced by Samuel Goldwyn after founding his studio Goldwyn Pictures. This film starred Mae Marsh, usually an actress for D.W. Griffith, but now under contract to Goldwyn for a series of films. The film was based on the 1907 Broadway play Polly of the Circus by Margaret Mayo which starred Mabel Taliaferro. Presumably when MGM remade Polly of the Circus in 1932 with Marion Davies, they still owned the screen rights inherited from the 1924 merger by Marcus Loew of the Metro, Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer studios. This film marks the first appearance of Slats, the lion mascot of Goldwyn Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Prints and/or fragments were found in the Dawson Film Find in 1978.
Florence Ryerson was an American playwright, screenwriter and co-author of the script for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Between 1915 and 1927 she published more than 30 short stories and then joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1926 to work on silent film scripts. In 1930 and 1933 she and her husband wrote two of the earliest books about teenage girlhood. The books were based on a short story series Ryerson had started in 1925. She continued to write for most of her life, writing plays for Broadway in the 1940s.
Aurania Rouverol was an American writer best known for her play Skidding, in which she created Andy Hardy and his family, who were turned into a popular series of sixteen movies from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Archibald Selwyn was a Canadian-American play broker, theater owner and stage producer who had many Broadway successes. He and his brother Edgar Selwyn were partners. They were among the founders of Goldwyn Pictures, later to be merged into MGM.
Polly of the Circus may refer to:
Polly of the Circus was a 1907 Broadway play by Margaret Mayo which starred Mabel Taliaferro and was produced by Taliaferro's husband, Frederic Thompson. A circus girl/minister love story known for its drama and its spectacle staging, the cast also included Edith Taliaferro, Herbert Ayling, Joseph Brennan, Mattie Ferguson, John Findlay, Guy Nichols, Ida St. Leon and Malcolm Williams.
Meher Baba Newsreel footage is a series of 1932 newsreels of Meher Baba's Messages to the west and his interviews with media at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, house of American actress Margaret Mayo in the United States, and Russell Square, 32 Russell Road, Kensington, London, England.
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