Today is the birthday of Alice Day (Jaquiline Alice Newman, 1905-1995).
While not as well known as her younger sister Marceline Day, Alice Day did make a mark of her own. She began her career as a Mack Sennett Bathing Girl in 1923, and appeared in several comedies with the likes of Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin, Ralph Graves, Eddie Quillan, and others. She has a pretty good role in Langdon’s His New Mamma as The Heiress.
By 1927, she had moved up to features and in 1928 she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She was still a star in the earliest days of talkies, appearing in musicals like Is Everybody Happy? with Ted Lewis, George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones, and The Show of Shows (all 1929). By 1932 she was down to B movie westerns and she got out of the business. One of her last was Two Fisted Law, with John Wayne and Tim McCoy.
To learn more about comedy film history please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc
To learn about the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
