Marjorie White
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| Marjorie White | |
|---|---|
| Born | Marjorie Ann Guthrie July 22, 1904 Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada |
| Died | August 21, 1935 (aged 31) Hollywood, California |
| Spouse(s) | Edwin J. Tierney (10 August 1924 - 21 August 1935) |
Marjorie White (22 July 1904 – 21 August 1935), was a Canadian-born actress of stage and early talkies.
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[edit] Career
Born Marjorie Ann Guthrie in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,[1] she was the daughter of a railroad worker who emigrated from Edinburgh. She entered show business at the age of eight, as one of the Winnipeg Kiddies, a troupe of child performers who toured Canada and the United States. She danced and sang with the troupe until too old to continue, then at twenty went to New York and played in vaudeville.
Teamed for a time with Thelma Wolpa as 'The White Sisters,' both women kept the name White after the act broke up. Thelma White later gained immortality as the blowsy Mae in Reefer Madness. According to the New York Times (August 11, 1924), Marjorie White married Eddie Tierney on August 10, 1924 in Greenwich, Connecticut. The act became 'The White Sisters and Tierney.'
She appeared on Broadway in several musicals between 1926 and 1929, when she and her husband moved to Hollywood. In accordance with studio tradition, four years were knocked off her birth date and she was supposedly born in 1908. Early biographies of James Cagney, the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby typically gave birthdates occurring five years after the actual event.
She began getting parts in pictures, starting with leading roles in Happy Days (1929) and Sunny Side Up (1929). The same year she was required by executives of the Fox Film studio to lose four pounds in order to secure a role in The New Orleans Frolic. White was diminutive to begin with, weighing only 103 pounds and standing 4'10" tall. The part called for a woman who weighed less than 100 pounds.[2] She returned to Broadway for a musical, Hot-Cha, in 1932, but came back to Hollywood thereafter.
Today, perhaps her best-remembered films are the Fox feature film Just Imagine (1930), and the first Columbia Pictures Three Stooges short, Woman Haters (1934), in which she was the wife Larry Fine needed to keep secret from his fellow Woman-Haters Club members. Woman Haters was her last film.
[edit] Death
On August 20, 1935, White was a passenger in a car driven by Marlow M. Lovell on the Roosevelt Highway near the Bel Air Beach Club, in Santa Monica, California. It sideswiped the car of a couple who had been married only an hour before, and overturned. A coroner's jury decided that the reckless driving of Lovell was to blame for the accident. White was riding with Lovell in the open car because another member of the party, Gloria Gould, was without a wrap. Gould was following Lovell's car in another vehicle with White's husband. White was the only person seriously injured. She died of internal hemorrhaging the next day, August 21, 1935, at a Hollywood hospital.
She was buried at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery). She was survived by her husband, her parents, and several siblings.[3] [4] [5]
[edit] References
- ^ Manitoba's Vital Statistics website, Birth Certificate registration # 1904,006829
- ^ Los Angeles Times, Small Actress Has To Reduce Further, October 4, 1929, Page A10
- ^ Winnipeg Free Press, 22 August 1935
- ^ Variety, 28 August 1935
- ^ Los Angeles Times, Actress' Death In Crash Laid To Reckless Driving, August 24, 1935, Page A3
