Blanche Sweet

It’s not that no one dropped from sight with the transition to talkies, obviously. We’ll be writing about someone today who did. It’s more that it’s considerably less common than people think it is, and in many cases the person dropped out of sight for unrelated reasons. Theda Bara had married and retired a year before The Jazz Singer, and while she teased a comeback on Lux Radio Theatre, it didn’t happen. Clara Bow’s biggest year of popularity was 1929; she, too, retired upon marriage. Pola Negri also married and retired, but when she miscarried and her husband gambled away their money, she made films in Europe and then later retired and then came out of retirement to be in The Moon-Spinners. “Married and retired” is a much bigger trope, honestly, and knows no era.

But then there’s Blanche Sweet. She has 162 credits on IMDb, including two TV appearances, but it’s almost certainly incomplete; their records for the silent era are spotty. Seven of them are talkies. One is a silent film in the talking picture era. And all the rest of them I know to be silent without looking them up because they predate The Jazz Singer. She was a massive star. She was film’s first Anna Christie, and if not all of her characters had names, well, a lot of silent films didn’t name their characters. She was apparently considered a likely choice to star in Birth of a Nation if she hadn’t left the studio.

Why didn’t she keep going in the era of sound? Honestly I don’t know. You can find examples of her voice on YouTube, and it’s certainly no worse than a lot of the other actresses of the time. Her acting’s a little overdone, in a very distinctly “I am used to silent films” way, but there are no few examples of that from 1930 from people who would go on to long careers in the talkies. What’s more, she left the screen and did radio and the stage for a while, both media that notoriously expect you to talk. There’s no marriage whose dates tie neatly with her retirement. She’s just gone.

What’s more, while it’s definitely true that a lot of stars from the early age of Hollywood weren’t as well paid as you might expect—Biograph wouldn’t even credit its actors—she’s clearly someone who handled her money badly. She worked as a store clerk in both New York and Los Angeles in the years after her film career. She was in the stage version of The Petrified Forest, and that’s a challenging play. I can’t imagine people wouldn’t have wanted to see her act more, and yet she didn’t. She could have gotten into the early days of television, one assumes, and she didn’t.

Oh, there’s a documentary about her that I might be able to track down, and that might explain it. But if it does, no one’s seen fit to put that information in any of my usual sources. I promise you that these articles are more than just reworded Wikipedia entries, but it’s true that Wikipedia is awfully handy for writing them. If any of its editors have seen the documentary, and if it reveals why she left Hollywood, they have not seen fit to share the information with the rest of the class. What’s more, she doesn’t even come up in the conversation like Bara and Bow and Negri. She’s just gone.