Ouida Bergère
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ouida Bergère a.k.a Ida Berger (14 December 1886 - 29 November 1974) was a scriptwriter and an actress whose talent as an artist of the stage and the screen, has brought her much of distinction and popularity from the 1910s to the late 1920s, and whose career has been exceptional in many of its phases.
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[edit] Biography
Born Ouida DuGaze, she made her advent into the world under exceptional circumstances, as she was born on a railroad train that was enroute to Madrid, Spain, her mother having at the time been on her way to visit the home of her husband's parents, in that city, and not having anticipated the appearance of a little daughter prior to her arrival at her destination. Ouida was a daughter of Stephen and Marion DuGaze, the former of Spanish lineage and the latter of French and English ancestry.
Bergère passed the first four years of her life in the home of her paternal grandparents, in Madrid, her parents having in the meanwhile traveled extensively about the world. She was able to speak only the Spanish language when she was four years of age, and thus was not able to understand when her mother returned to Madrid and spoke to her in English.
Between the ages of four and six years she lived with her parents in Paris, and then she was in England until she had attained the age of eleven years. She then moved to the United States, Bergère advanced her education by attending the Potter School at Bowling Green, Kentucky, the National Park Seminary in Washington, D. C., and the exclusive school on the Hudson River in New York. She lived for a time in Connecticut; thereafter was in the home of an aunt in Virginia, then in New Orleans, Arkansas, as well as in Kentucky.
[edit] Career
Bergère became associated with the stage when she was but a girl. Playwright Winchell Smith gave her a first opportunity to play a part, and her talent enabled her to make rapid progress, but an affliction came to her in the loss of her voice, so that she was compelled to abandon her stage career. Under these conditions she showed the versatility of her talent by turning her attention to literary pursuits. She thus wrote for the New York Herald and for various magazines, besides writing stories for motion-picture production.
The silver-screen industry eventually enlisted her attention to such an extent that she learned virtually all things pertaining to the production of motion pictures and their business exploitation. She wrote and directed plays, designed costumes and stage settings, wrote titles, did the cutting of films, and appeared in leading roles. Thus she gained wide experience in the earlier period of modern motion-picture production, and she has won much success and distinction in connection with this great industry and art. She wrote most of the stories for the various films in which Elsie Ferguson starred, many of the best for Mae Murray, including On With the Dance, in which Bergère registered her first great claim to stellar honors. She wrote many stories also for Pola Negri, for Corinne Griffith and for others who have won stardom. She prepared in 1920 the screen version of Peter Ibbetson, in which Elsie Ferguson and Wallace Reid appeared. In this connection fate played for her a most gracious part, for it was in this connection that she met Basil Rathbone, who was playing lead in the stage production of this play, this casual meeting having ripened into a friendship that culminated in marriage, in 1926.
Among the Paramount pictures Bergère prepared for Elsie Ferguson may be mentioned The Avalanche, Society Exile, and The Witness for the Defense. For Murray she did Idols of Clay, On With the Dance, and The Right to Love, for Pola Negri she did Bella Donna; for Bert Lytell and Betty Compson she did To Have and To Hold; for Corinne Griffith she did Six Days.
Her first husband, George Fitzmaurice, directed many of these plays. In 1929 a notable play written by Bergère and successfully released through the medium of the screen was Suburbia Comes to Paradise. She has done pictures in England, France and Italy. In Rome she did the picture entitled The Eternal City, which enlisted the cooperative assistance of the Fascist and of the Mussolini himself, the American ambassador in Rome having aided her in obtaining this cooperation. She photographed in this connection a scene in which Mussolini was depicted in the writing of a letter, and summoning a man to post it. She later asked the distinguished dictator if he really wrote the important letter and thus dispatched it, and he replied in the affirmative, he having acceded to her a most gracious assistance and having proved to be a man of great charm, as she still remembers with recurrent pleasure. Ten thousand of the Fascist appeared in the Coliseum scenes for The Eternal City.
After her marriage to Basil Rathbone, Bergère gave up her picture work to assist him in his work and in the management of his business affairs.
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Writer
- The Eternal City (1923)
- Six Days (1923)
- The Cheat (1923)
- The Rustle of Silk (1923)
- Bella Donna (1923)
- Kick In (1922)
- To Have and to Hold (1922)
- The Man from Home (1922)
- Peacock Alley (1922)
- Three Live Ghosts (1922)
- Peter Ibbetson (1921)
- Paying the Piper (1921)
- Idols of Clay (1920)
- The Right to Love (1920)
- On with the Dance (1920)
- The Broken Melody (1919)
- Counterfeit (1919)
- The Witness for the Defense (1919)
- A Society Exile (1919)
- Our Better Selves (1919)
- The Avalanche (1919)
- The Profiteers (1919)
- The Cry of the Weak (1919)
- Common Clay (1919)
- The Narrow Path (1918)
- A Japanese Nightingale (1918)
- More Trouble (1918)
- The Hillcrest Mystery (1918)
- The On-the-Square Girl (1917)
- The Iron Heart (1917)
- Kick In (1917)
- The Romantic Journey (1916)
- Arms and the Woman (1916)
- Big Jim Garrity (1916)
- Virtue Triumphant (1916)
- New York (1916)
- Wasted Lives (1915)
- At Bay (1915)
- Saints and Sinners (1915)
- The Esterbrook Case (1915)
[edit] Actress
- Getting Even (1912)
- Mates and Mis-Mates (1912)
[edit] Casting Director
- At Bay (1915)
[edit] Self
- Screen Snapshots Series 18, No. 10: Stars at a Charity Ball (1939)
