Stars Of The Beauty Parlor Series
The Beauty Parlor was a series of twelve shorts released in 1927 from F.B.O.
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Kit Guard was born Christen Klitgaard May 5, 1894 in Hals, Denmark. His parents, Jens and Thyra Klitgaard, were farmers and he had four bothers. The family immigrated to Canada in 1901 and later moved to San Francisco, California. He became an American citizen and went to New York City where he worked as a blacksmith. During World War 1 he joined the Army and served overseas in a military police unit. After the war he moved to Hollywood and was signed by F.B.O. Pictures. He starred in more than one hundred silent shorts including The Telephone Girl series with Alberta Vaiughn and The Beauty Parlor series with Lorraine Eason. Kit often costarred with Al Cooke and they became a popular onscreen comedy team. On August 1, 1924 her married 24 year old Nell Griffith Sullivan. She filed for divorce in 1928 claiming he was a a violent alcoholic. By the 1930s Kit was appearing in low low budget B-movies. He had bit parts in several Three Stooges shorts and was in numerous Westerns including The Fighting Champ and El Diablo Rides with Bob Steele. Sadly his second wife passed away. Kit married his third wife, Hazel Bowers, and continued to act until the late 1950s. He had uncredited roles on the TV shows Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel. Kit died from stomach cancer on July 18, 1961. He was buried at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.- Al Cooke was born on 26 September 1880 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Defenders of the Law (1931), One Minute to Play (1926) and A Small Town Idol (1921). He died on 6 July 1935 in Santa Monica, California, USA.
- Thelma Hill was born Thelma Floy Hillerman in Emporia, Kansas. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California during her early teen years. Living just blocks from the Mack Sennett studio, Thelma became one of the star struck, wide eyed girls who hung out near the studio peering through the gates. It took her five years, but eventually, using her womanly wiles, she weaseled her way through the gates and quickly caught the eye of Sennett himself and F. Richard "Dick" Jones, a producer and director who would work with Thelma in over a dozen films.
Thelma did bit parts and extra work throughout her school years, working weekends and during vacations. Because of her youth, beauty, and spunk, she quickly became "everybody's protégé."
When Mack Sennett revived his famous "Bathing Girls," Thelma the first to don the suit, as most of her parts up till then had been in bathing suits. In her first movie, "Picking Peaches," she had dived off a pier.
Because of her "mah jongg" bathing suit, she became quickly known as the "Mah Jongg Bathing Girl," although she'd already carried around a nickname since her first days on the set: "Pee-Wee," the little black-eyed youngster who grew up on the old lot.
As she matured she was hired to double for Mabel Normand, who, because of a roaring cocaine habit often showed up late for work or not at all. It was about this time that Thelma became a flapper; a style of women who were known for their androgynous bodies, flimsy and revealing clothing, and the traditional male behaviors smoking, heavy drinking, and casual sex. It was the drinking that eventually led to Thelma's downfall. Near the end of her first year in film, 1924, her big break came when she got the lead opposite Ralph Graves in the two reel comedy "Love's Sweet Piffle" directed by Edgar Kennedy.
Thelma was the first Sennett bathing beauty, and one of the few, to make it into feature films. She starred opposite Ben Turpin in "The Prodigal Bridegroom," and got one of the two female leads in the hilarious Laurel & Hardy "Two Tars" in 1928.
When Hollywood brought Jimmy Murphy's comic strip "Toots and Casper" to life on the big screen, Thelma got top billing opposite Bud Duncan as Casper, with Cullen Johnson as Buttercup and George Gray as Casper's boss. The series ran from 1927 through 1929.
One biographer wrote that she starred opposite a solo Stan Laurel (in "Pie-Eyed") but calling 24 seconds on the screen as a starring role seems a stretch.
Everyone in Hollywood knew Thelma was a real trooper with a knack for comedy. She willingly dropped her good looks to don thick black-rimmed glasses and a wild hairdo and work on two reel comedies rather than full length dramatic films. No part was too small for her. Later, during talkies, she played a bit part of a patient in the waiting room in W. C. Fields' "The Dentist." Today, all copies have been so cut up and repaired that her short scene has been lost.
She left Mack Sennett for a short stint with the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) (also known as FBO Pictures Corporation) in 1927, and afterwards was signed by MGM to play a role in "The Fair Coed." It was about this time that she got engaged to St. Elmo Boyce, her director on the "Toots and Casper" shorts and a former Sennett cinematographer. Boyce and Hill both had drinking problems, Boyce having DUI arrests on his record. The relationship and Boyce's career began to fizzle and Boyce committed suicide in 1930 by poisoning. He'd just finished work on Columbia Pictures' most expensive film to date, "Dirigible."
Thelma Hill did not make the transition to talkies well. Her drinking and depression were starting to take their toll. She began working free lance for a variety of studios. She had made over 20 films in 1929, but with the advent of talkies and the end of frenetic slapstick comedy, she would work on just seven films over the next five years.
Her first sound film was "The Golfers" with the Sennett studios. Her next role was in a musical called "Two Plus Fours" featuring Bing Crosby as one of the Rhythm Boys. She took a small role in Frank Capra's drama, "The Miracle Woman," starring Barbara Stanwyck, a few more small, uncredited parts, one short educational film starring a very, very young Shirley Temple, and ended her career in 1934 at "The Lot of Fun," Hal Roach Studios, in the movie "Mixed Nuts." Her role was small, but unforgettable as she becomes the target of a professor of entomology's Arabian Sand Fleas.
She married John Sinclair (I), W. C. Fields' stunt double and gag writer, and settled into the role of housewife less than ten minutes away from the original Mack Sennett studios.
Whether fueled by her depression or her husband's hanging around with W. C. Fields, famous for his drinking, Thelma drank away her health and youth and died before her thirty-second birthday in 1938.
Biographers mistakenly attribute her cause of death to acute alcohol poisoning (erroneously reported as a "stomach ailment" in her obituary), but records show she had spent the last month of her life at the Edward Merrill Sanitarium (mistakenly listed in Culver City; actually in Venice, CA). She had been diagnosed with chronic alcoholism in 1932 and with pellagra (a B-vitamin deficiency, specifically niacin, often found in alcoholics) in 1937. The effects of malnutrition caused by alcoholism affect all organs in the body, and her official cause of death following an autopsy was cerebral hemorrhage.
Her body was cremated and the ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. - Lorraine Eason was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father worked for the government and the family moved often. Lorraine was educated in Panama and New York. When she was a teenager she convinced her parents to let her move to Hollywood to become an actress. She made her film debut in the 1923 drama The Temple of Venus. Florenz Ziegfeld offered her a featured role in his Ziegfeld Follies but she turned it down. In 1925 Lorraine was chosen to attend Paramount Pictures "School For Stars" in Astoria, New York. She had starring roles in the Westerns The Grey Devil and Riders of the Sand Storm.
Lorraine signed a five year contract with F.B.O. Pictures in 1926. She appeared in numerous shorts including The Beauty Parlor and Boys Will Be Girls. Unhappy with the roles she was being offered she quit acting in 1928. Lorraine was engaged to Detroit businessman Harry Elsner but they broke up. She married Captain Harold A. White, an Olympic athlete and Army Intelligence officer, in 1933. The couple moved to Georgia and remained together until Harold's death in 1973. Lorraine died on October 24, 1986 at the age of eighty-two.