Billie Burke Has Good Part in "Topper Takes a Trip”

Northern Advocate, 22 July 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

Billie Burke Has Good Part in "Topper Takes a Trip”

Billie Burke, one of filmdom’s most popular comediennes, who is featured with Roland Young and Alan Mowbray in support of Constance Bennett in Hal Roach’s gay comedy, “Topper Takes a Trip,” is a great believer in the home and feels that civilisation would perish if women deserted domesticity entirely.

Miss Burke loves children and claims that if she were to retire from the screen, she would like nothing better than caring for and training children—especially those belonging to women obliged to work. Meanwhile, she enjoys being known as a good trouper who still nurtures a secret ambition to write a successful play- .

The actress hails from a family which worshipped at the Muse of Thespis via the circus. Her father was a famous circus clown and skilled pantomimist. Billie was born in Washington, D.C., and was sent to school in England. Here, too, she made her stage debut in an operetta,. “School Girls.” Following this engagement, she returned to her native land to become a Broadway star and to marry the late Florenz Ziegfeld.

Hollywood fame followed stage fame, and Billie became one of the film colony’s most beloved actresses. Among her long list of hits are such outstanding films as “BilJ of Divorcement,” “Christopher Strong,” “Dinner at Eight,” “Parnell,” “Everybody Sing,” “Merrily We Live” and “The Young in Heart.” The story of “Topper Takes a Trip,” which is released by United Artists, concerns the mad, merry antics of

Constance Bennett, as Marion Kerby, and Roland Young, as Cosmo Topper, on the sunny sands of the French Riviera, whither Miss Bennett has gone to “do a good deed” and where, instead, she almost upsets the Toppers’ lives.