Original 1934 Large Format White Studio Photograph Lenore Ulric on Stage w/ Dogs

Description

ITEM: This is a 1934 vintage and original large format theatre photograph by White Studio. Helmed by photographer George W. Lucas, White Studio was New York City's foremost theatre photography studio in the early 20th century. The studio specialized in production stills, focusing on sweeping, head-on shots of productions usually taken during dress rehearsal. The studio would also occasionally do portraiture/studio work.
Pictured here is Broadway and Hollywood star Lenore Ulric who smiles for the photographer while on stage with her three dogs. This still was used as publicity for Ulric's July, 1934 appearance in "Pagan Lady" at the Ivan E. Cedar Drama Festival in John H. Hessel Memorial Hall in Long Island.
Photograph measures 9.25" x 12.5" without margins, as created, on a matte double weight paper stock with paper caption on verso.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
More about Lenore Ulric:
Lenore Ulric (born Lenore Ulrich, July 21, 1892 – December 30, 1970) was a star of the Broadway stage and Hollywood films of the silent-film and early sound era.
Discovered in 1913 by theater director David Belasco, who would go on to manage her stage career, she was noted for portraying fiery, hot-blooded women of the typical vamp.
Her father, Franz Xavier Ulrich, was a United States Army hospital steward. He reportedly named his daughter Lenore due to his fondness for the Edgar Allan Poe poem, "The Raven". She later dropped the "h" from her surname. She had two sisters, Florence and Isabel. Her mother died in 1937.
As a schoolgirl, Lenore obtained a job with a stock company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She played with stock companies in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois. She worked briefly as a film actress for Essanay Studios and joined another stock company in Schenectady, New York. She found work in The First Man (1911), A Polished Burglar (1911), Kilmeny (1915), and The Better Woman (1915).
She specialized in playing sultry, impassioned women. In 1915, she went to work for Pallas Pictures starring in several silent pictures, such as Frozen Justice and The Intrigue, that survive today at the Library of Congress.
Ulric was discovered by theatrical producer David Belasco who first saw her in The Bird of Paradise in 1913, after Ulric wrote to him requesting that he see her on stage. Belasco, who would go on "fishing trips" to find new stage talents, recalled that it was often a long time between "bites," but he enjoyed the sport as he sometimes would "hook a big one."
After watching her on stage, he asked her to audition at his playhouse. He watched her perform while he sat incognito in one of the theater's seats. "After twenty minutes," he said, "I knew I was watching a very talented and unusual young woman." He then offered her the leading role in The Heart of Wetona. He recalled: "Among the biggest I have ever landed is, I believe, little Miss Ulric: I think she will grow bigger every season she is before the public."
Biographer William Winter called her a "born actress," someone who Belasco hoped would fulfill the theater's need for talent. Winter also notes that no one in her family had ever been involved in acting, adding: "She resorted to the dramatic calling not through mere vanity, the impulse of personal exhibition, or the acquisitive hope of profit, but because her natural vocation is acting."
Under Belasco's management during most of her stage career, Ulric played a variety of female roles. Among them was her portrayal of Rose, a French-Canadian orphan, in Tiger Rose (1917). Winter says that Ulric's personality traits allowed her to play the role realistically as written:
Miss Lenore Ulric, who acts the part, is possessed of exceptional natural advantages,—youth; a handsome face; abundant hair; expressive eyes, dark and beautiful; a slender, lithe figure; a sympathetic voice; strong, attractive personality, and an engaging manner. Her temperament is intense, her nature passionate, her style direct and simple. Her acting reveals force of character, experience, observation, thought, sensibility, ardor, definite purpose, and unusual command of the mechanics of art...She is an admirable listener, an excellent speaker...The disposition she exhibits in this performance seems altogether childlike and lovely. Under Belasco's sagacious direction, she should go far.
She acted in numerous plays at the Belasco Theater, all under the direction of Belasco. She played in The Son-Daughter (1919), a play about China by Belasco and George Scarborough, which ran for 223 performances. She played a Parisian street urchin in Kiki (1921), a seductress in The Harem (1924), and in one of Ulric's biggest hits for Belasco, the 1926 Lulu Belle, where she played a prostitute, a genre that spawned several Broadway hits in the 1920s. In 1928 she starred in Mima. Other stars who played at the Belasco during that period included Lionel Barrymore and Katharine Cornell.
After seeing Ulric in some of her plays, British producer Charles Cochrane cabled David Belasco with an "urgent request" that he be granted the privilege of presenting Ulric at one of his London playhouses. During that time, however, Belasco had been writing a new version of Camille for Ulric to star in. According to one critic, "Miss Ulric's youth fits her peculiarly for the part, while her undisputed genius as an emotional actress justifies the prediction that she would be the greatest Camille who has ever been seen upon the stage."
In 1947 she returned to the Belasco Theater after doing seven films in Hollywood, beginning with a leading role in a revival of Antony and Cleopatra, alongside Eli Wallach, Maureen Stapleton and Charlton Heston. She told a critic, "I certainly never really left the theater." Belasco had managed her stage career until shortly before his death. In a tribute to Belasco, she said:
All of us who were with him depended upon him so much that we'd just flounder around and say, "What do I do now?" He was a good soldier, a hard worker, and a great director.
During the height of her stage career, Ulric was considered one of the American theater's "great stars." She was noted for portraying fiery, hot-blooded women of the typical "femme fatale." According to the New York Times, theater-goers would go to her plays just to see her, while the play in which she appeared was secondary. Ulric's "name in white lights blazing on the playhouse marquee was always more compelling" than the play itself.
Lenore came to Hollywood in 1929 and appeared in Frozen Justice and South Sea Rose. She signed with Fox Film Corporation to make several films with an approximate salary of 0,000. Frozen Justice was directed by Allan Dwan. Some of the scenes were filmed in Alaska. She was successful in a supporting role in Camille, starring Greta Garbo. Ulric returned to Broadway in 1940, acting in The Fifth Column by Ernest Hemingway and again in 1947, in a revival of Antony and Cleopatra.
Ulric had been married only once, to actor Sidney Blackmer from 1928–1939. She accepted some of the blame for their divorce:
I don't think I'm comfortable to live with. I have a temper. I'm difficult. I'm too quick and too impulsive. And men have a right to be comfortable.
She died of heart failure in Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg, New York on December 30, 1970, aged 78.
Biography From Wikipedia
More about White Studio:
For twenty-years from 1905 to 1925 White Studio was Broadway's foremost photographer of stage production. Founded by New York saloonkeeper Luther S. White (1857-1936), this photographic agency employed a series of cameramen from 1903 to 1936, some talented, some not, who recorded hundreds of performers and thousands of productions of the American stage. The Studio was divided into two operations: the portrait studio located on Broadway and a mobile team of production photographers who hauled lights, tripods, and cumbersome Agfa and Kodak plate cameras to the dress rehearsals for stage pictures. Two great artists worked uncredited in the portrait studio: Edward Thayer Monroe during the 1910s and Ralph Shaklee in the 1930s.
For much White Studio's history, George Lucas was chief stage photographer. Lucas revolutionized production photography with the introduction of flash-pan photography, a method of illumination safer than 'flash-light' (magnesium powder, alcohol, ignited by blow torch) used by Joseph Byron, the chief stage photographer on Broadway from 1893 to 1905, before the ascendency of White Studios.
Luther White, proprietor of the studio, in later life claimed to have been a photographer. Lucas, however, stated that White never posed or processed photographs. He was a broker and businessman. As an entrepreneur, White was effective. When Joseph Byron and his Percy were experiencing differences of opinion in 1905, White bought the elder Byron's equipment and usurped his client list. White then secured an exclusive agreement with the Schubert organization to record their New York productions.
During the 1920s, the studio lacked the aesthetic panache of the most advanced theatrical image artists. Luther White no longer exerted himself with the energy of his younger years. In 1930, he took up raising Guernsey Cows on his farm in Connecticut. He turned over direction of the studio to his son, Dexter, in 1934. At this juncture, the most experienced artist, George Lucas, departed setting up Lucas-Pritchard with Irving Pritchard, the man who kept the books for White Studio. Lucas quickly determined he needed a creative collaborator rather than a financial guru, so called upon his old colleague at White from the World War I period, Edward Thayer Monroe. Lucas-Pritchard became Lucas-Monroe. White Studio's old clients gravitated toward the new partnership.
Perhaps from stress induced by presiding over a failing enterprise, Dexter White died of a heart attack on May 4, 1939, bringing an end to the studio. Its archive was secured by the Theater Collection of the New York Public Library. However, many of the earliest glass plates were destroyed during the First World War when donated to the War Department for recycling. David S. Shields/ALS
Specialty:
White Studios dominated production photography in the New York theater for two decades, specializing in frontal panoramas of theatrical action taken during dress rehearsals and occasionally during performances. Because the exposure of the glass plates required that casts remain motionless for as long as 45 seconds, the production shots from 1904-1913 seem wooden and pedestrian. George W. Lucas, chief location photographer, became more innovative and intimate during the 1910s.
White Studios also had a portrait department. Edward Thayer Monroe's depictions of the early Ziegfeld performers are quite artistic, including the iconic view of Bessie McCoy sitting on the Crescent Moon. Another noteworthy body of early works are Lucas's production views of "Chanticleer."
Biography By: Dr. David S. Shields, McClintock Professor, University of South Carolina,
Photography & The American Stage | The Visual Culture Of American Theater 1865-1965