Madge Evans
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Madge Evans (July 1, 1909 - April 26, 1981) was an American film actress who began her career as a child performer and model. She possessed classical features with reddish-yellow hair.
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[edit] Child Model and Stage Actress
Evans was featured in print ads as the "Fairy Soap girl" as an infant. She made her professional debut at the age of six months, posing for artist's models. As a youth her playmates included Robert Warwick, Holbrook Blinn, and Henry Hull. When she was four years old Evans was featured in a series of child plays produced by William Brady. She worked at the old Long Island, New York movie studio. Her success was immediate, so much so that her mother loaned her daughter's name to a hat company. Evans posed in a mother and child tableau with Anita Stewart, then 16, for an Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company calendar, and as the little mountain girl in Heidi of the Alps.
At the age of 13 Evans was paired with John Barrymore in the first screen version of Peter Ibbetson. She did Richard Barthelmess in Classmates. At 17 she returned to the stage and appeared as the ingenue (stock character) in Daisy Mayme. Some of her best work in plays came in productions of Dread, The Marquis, and The Conquering Male. Her last appearance was in Philip Goes Forth produced by George Kelley. Evans' mother took her to England and Europe when she was 15.
[edit] Film Career
She was working on stage when she signed with Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1927. As with theater, she continued to play ingenue parts, the beautiful fiancee of her film's leading men.
Working for MGM for in the 1930s, she appeared in Dinner at Eight (1933) and David Copperfield (1935). In 1933 she starred with James Cagney in a melodrama entitled The Mayor of Hell. Evans had the role of a pretty nurse in a reformatory who solicits the aid of a tough politician, played by Cagney. Other notable movies in which she played are Pennies From Heaven (1936) and What Every Woman Knows (1934).
[edit] Marriage
In 1939 she married playwright Sidney Kingsley. Kingsley is best known for his plays, later turned into popular films, Dead End and Detective Story. The two owned a fifty-acre estate two miles from Oakland, New Jersey. With snow drifts five feet high blocking roadways, the couple were snowbound there in February 1940. Following her marriage to Kinsley, Evans left Hollywood and moved to the New Jersey home.
[edit] Radio and Television
Later she worked in rado and television in New York City. Evans performed on the Philco Television Playhouse (1949-1950), Studio One (1954), Matinee Theater (1955), and The Alcoa Hour (1956). She refused repeated offers to return to Hollywood. She retired in 1971.
Madge Evans died at her home in Oakland, New Jersey of cancer in 1981.
[edit] Trivia
Evans' favorite sport was riding horses. She owned Prudence and Toughie, both dogs of the Scottish Terrier breed.
[edit] References
- Los Angeles Times, Marriages In Hollywood Exceed Divorces In 1939, January 2, 1940, Page A1.
- Los Angeles Times, Madge Evans and Husband Held Prisoners by Snow, February 18, 1940, Page 7.
- Los Angeles Times, Child Film Star, Ingenue Madge Evans Dies at 71, April 27, 1981, Page A1.
- Oakland, California Tribune, Two Wise Young Maidens, January 10, 1937, Page 80.
- San Mateo Times, A Defence of Youth, January 18, 1936, Page 15.
- Syracuse Herald, Madge Evans, Joan Marsh, and Jackie Coogan head Sextet Surviving, Sunday Morning, July 19, 1931, Section 3, Page 11.
- Zanesville, Ohio Signal, Madge Evans Has Role With James Cagney, July 16, 1933, Page 12.
