Pauline Frederick - Career

Career

As a girl she was fascinated with show business, and determined early to place her goals in the direction of the theater. She reminisced in an interview in Motion Picture Magazine (December 1918)

As a child there were several things besides some well-known young medicines that I disliked to take, and one of these was a dare. When one of my playmates, whose favorite pastime was running off to the theater whenever we could save money enough to buy tickets and reproducing what we had seen on an elaborate home scale, said: ‘Polly, I dare you to go on the real stage,’ of course I just had to go. I had been studying singing, and succeeded in persuading the manager of a vaudeville house in Boston to hear a couple of my songs. “I’ll put you on for a week,” the manager agreed, “and pay you fifty dollars.”

That was the first money she earned, and to Pauline, it seemed like a fortune. “My chums were there in full force that night waiting to see ‘Polly take her dare,’ and for their sakes I had to be brave about it, though I can remember to this day how I quaked inwardly when I stepped out on the stage and saw the hundreds of eyes turned toward me. I thought each eye was saying: ‘She never did this before,’ and in companion I was answering: ‘No, she never did.’ Well, I managed to get through my three songs some way or another, and after that it wasn’t so bad. That first week gave me the courage to go further and, of course, further meant New York.”

In 1908 Pauline was in an 'alleged' serious automobile wreck according to her 1939 postumous biography. The wreck was said to have impaired her ability to have children. However this sounds dubious and points more to the fact that she may have undergone a botched abortion.

A well-known stage star, Frederick was already in her 30s when she began making films. She specialized in playing commanding and authoritative women throughout her film career. Her stunning beauty stayed with her as she aged into her best remembered roles—sacrificing mothers and 40-something women having a last fling at youth and romance. She was able to make a successful transition to "talkies" in 1929, and was cast as Joan Crawford's mother in This Modern Age (1931).

Frederick generally played an angry matriarch. Frederick never shyed away from parts that often other actresses of the time feared, often due to the role being controversial or out of character.

Frederick has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard. Many of Frederick's silent films such as The Eternal City (1915) are now considered lost films. Others survive in fragile condition in sole remaining prints in archives. One example that survives and is readily available on home video is Smouldering Fires (1925) that showcase her talents as a dramatic actress.

More of her work is available in the talkie era such as This Modern Age with Joan Crawford, the excellent whodunnit The Phantom of Crestwood (1932) and the color film Ramona (1936). Crawford idolized Frederick and based a lot of her persona on the veteran actress.