ACROSS THE FOOTLIGHTS

Taranaki Daily News, 30 March 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

ACROSS THE FOOTLIGHTS

STAGE AND SCREEN VIEWS. NO PICTURES. Claudette Colbert never adorns the walls of her homes with pictures. She uses only pieces of jade. Evelyn Laye. The British singing star Evelyn .Laye was burn in London on July 10. She studied dancing, then went on the stage to score in “Mme. Pompadour,” “Luck of the Navy” and other hits and also in British films. In America she scored in “One Heavenly Night” and “Evensong.” Ramon Novarro. Ramon Novarro was bom in Durango, Mexico, on February 6. He studied for opera, then, in silent pictures, won stardom and with the advent of sound became the screen’s foremost singing star. Among his successes are “The Pagan," “The Barbarian,” “Mata Hari” and the Cat and the Fiddle.” Her Own Life. Mae West is planning to write the story of her own life as soon as she has finished her new film, “Now I’m . a Lady.” Hundreds of writers have written about her in hundreds of different ways, but she is not satisfied with these. “Mae West is the only one -who can write the epic of Mae West,” she says. Wears no Make-Up. Warner Oland, star of “Charlie Chan in London,” wears no make-up for his famous characterisation of the Chinese sleuth. He has the natural aids of .straight black hair, very dark eyes and an olive skin tanned from long visits to his beach home. All he has to do for Charlie is to . brush the ends of his eyebrows upwards and the ends of his moustache downwards. Swan-Scared. Mary Astor, who has the role of a suspected murderess in the Warner Bros. 1 melodramatic mystery thriller, “The Case of the Howling Dog,” has a pair of Dobermann Pinschers, which she cannot persuade to go near Toluca Lake at the foot of her lawns of her new home. One of them, when Miss Astor first moved into the residence, tried to make friends with the swans that inhabit the lake and got severely nipped on the nose for his sociability. “Seventy-Five Broken Hearts.” Signed “Seventy-Five Broken Hearts,” a letter was recently received by Ginger Rogers warning her to keep her newlyacquired husband away from Honolulu. “Right now he is the most unpopular man in the Hawaiian Islands,” says the letter, which carries the signatures of

75 men stationed at the United States Army base in the Pacific. “Maybe later we will relent and urge you and Lew to come to Hawaii,” reads the letter. “But right now . . . well, we can’t even think sanely of the man who stole our sweetheart.” An Expensive Duck. Through the work of an imaginative script writer a special attendant had to be called in to protect Marlene Dietrich in opening scenes of her new film, “Carnival in Spain.” A particularly obnoxious duck was made Marlene’s leading man for the first day, because of its charming penchant for biting buttons off coats and snapping at any arms and legs within reach. In half an hour it had chewed off most of Marlene Dietrich’s elaborate Andalusian costume; nipped Lionel Atwell in most unexpected places at most unexpected times; ruined some 40 fet of film by quacking in the wrong place; and knocked over a larr/> costing about £5O. Production was held up for over a day while the studio sought someone who knew something about duck .controlling.