A Working Day

Southland Times, Issue 20641, 13 November 1928, Page 13

A Working Day

Miss Boyd, one of the youngest British Film Stars who has completed a new British Picture “Auld Lang Syne” with Sir Harry Lauder has written the following account of a film star's working day. My day in the studio begins at about the same time as for people in offices and shops. Normally, I have to be there at 9.30, which means leaving my house in Surrey an hour earlier. I drive to the studio, and the moment I arrive I begin to dress and make-up, which usually takes about half-an-hour. Make-up is a comparatively easy process. First of all, you wash your face in cold water, then dab on a special kind of makeup cream—-either dark pink or light pink, according to what the camera-man says—in my case, the darker variety. Then you touch up your eyelashes with “eye-black,” put green on the eyelids and rouge on the lips, so as to photograph well, and the thing is done. Every star has a dressing-room of her own, blazing with mirrors and looking half like a boudoir and half like a sitting-room. Here I change, talk, read, sew, play the gramophone, and amuse myself when not wanted on the set. Sometimes I rest 1 What I’ve got to wear will already have been detailed the previous evening in the “call” written up outside the studio. You have to be careful about your choice of clothes, because only certain colours come out well on the screen. Fawn, beige, pale pink, blue, and pale green are all good colours, but never white, or red and only black if you want to look black on the screen yourself, which isn’t often. It’s a good thing I don't have to pay for all the clothes I wear or I should be bankrupt in a week'. Except for the colour, I just choose what I like so long as it’s suited to the part I am playing. Once on the set, I may be there till quite late at night, with an interval of an hour for lunch and half an hour for tea. Dinner? —well, there isn’t any real dinner—you just eat bread and butter and cheese or something thick and British like that! Perhaps you take hours over a single scene. Each “shot’’ has to be rehearsed two or three times beforehand, and it may be photographed as many times afterwards. Douglas Fairbanks once told me that Chaplin had a single scene photographed 102 times! “Shooting” goes on all day, and sometimes I have spent as long as 15 hours continuously in the studio. Then there “stills” to be taken—photographs for reproduction outside the theatre—and if you are keen, there is always something interesting to watch while you are not playing yourself. And all day long your are working to an appalling noise of hammering from carpenters, shouts of command from directors and camera-men, and the endless racket that always goes on in film studies everywhere. By the end of the day I am quite ready to trot off to bed. No good making appointments! You never know, even from hour to hour, whether you can keep them. But although it is hard work it is good fun, and from what I have seen of it the harder you work the more thilling it is.