“American girls train themselves for the stage. They record and reveal every passing emotion, while the English girl is taught to conceal everything she feels. What we in England are taught is ‘breeding’ is our greatest handicap as artistes. We are shut up, ‘fountains sealed,’ as it were, and when we do melt into a role and mold ourselves to it, believe me, we work ten times as hard as an American actress would work to achieve the same end.” — Estelle Winwood
Source: Elizabeth Heinemann (1918)
Photo: 1920
“I’ve been on the stage ever since I was twelve years old. I have had training such as no American actress is put through. Even before I went on the stage, I was on the stage. We spent more time rehearsing than we ever did studying. Most of the things we did were old fairy pieces and Shakespeare. But going back even earlier than that, I may say the only interest in my life was the stage – the old stagecoach that used to run in Ealing, England, where I was born. My earliest recollection is of this stage rumbling past our gate on its way to the station. To this day, I do not know why it met the trains. I am sure no stranger ever arrived, and no one in Ealing, as I remember it, ever went away anywhere to return. My family moved to London, and it was there I started my real stage career. I got my early training under Sir John Hare. I did all sorts of parts in all sorts of plays, Drury Lane melodrama heroines especially. I went to South Africa to play ‘bits’ with James Welch, who is now dead. I played only one small role, and after that I was suddenly elevated to real parts and played the ‘leads’ with him. South Africa was a beautiful experience. We got there at Christmas-time, which is midsummer with them. I recall Africa as a land of perpetual sunshine and bamboo furniture. Everything seemed to say: ‘We have just arrived and we are only stopping here a minute.’ I played for five years in repertory theater in Liverpool on my return to England, and I was in London three years before I came over here to appear in ‘Hush!'” — Estelle Winwood
Source: Elizabeth Heinemann (1918)
“England seems very far away now. I am making no plans to return. I am getting my courage up to have a test picture made. If I ‘register’ I shall do Moving Picture work as a vacation pastime this winter, and I shall continue to play Sweetie in ‘A Successful Calamity,’ which reopened at the Booth Theater in September. I do not feel cut off from my people. Since I have been in America I have not missed getting letters every week from England, and so far the U-boats have not intercepted one of my letters.” — Estelle Windwood.
NOTE: She did not appear in a film until 1933.
Source: Elizabeth Heinemann (1918)
Photo: 1918
