“What did I want to be when I was a little girl? Oh, that was funny! Nearly every girl has wanted to be a nun at one time and an actress at another, but I wanted to be both at the same time. It was a very real tragedy to me that I couldn’t figure out some way in which the two could be reconciled. When I grew to be a little older, I realized that it would be absolutely necessary for me to choose between them. So, I decided to be an actress.” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
The Strange Case of Talmailind (1915)
“I was playing in stock. One week when I was not working, someone called me up from the Biograph studio and asked if I would work two days for them. I was dreadfully insulted at first, but I went out of curiosity expecting to be offered about fifty cents a day. Mr. Griffith met me and said that he would give me ten dollars a day for two days work. Frankly, I didn’t believe him. Later, he told me that he had run out of checks and would pay in full the next day. Naturally, I thought it was all a bluff. The only reason I ever went back to the studio was to see how he would wiggle out of giving me the money. That night he gave me two crisp ten dollar bills and the shock nearly killed me.” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
Photo: 1917
“I wonder if the pictures we are making will look as crude a few years from now as those made by the old Biograph Company look to us now?” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
“The worst nuisance of all in those days was the trademark. It had to appear in every scene. Remember how, during some particularly pathetic parting, the circle with “AB” on it, was always the featured prop? I only appeared in three pictures with the Biograph and then I joined Selig. There you recall the brand was the ‘diamond S.’ Once, after the making of a scene in one of our worst thrillers, Mr. Bosworth and myself were both badly bruised up. Just as we were congratulating ourselves on having finished the thing. we discovered that the property man had forgotten to hang the trademark in a sufficient conspicuous place and we had to do all over again. Sometimes we would get miles out on location, discover that the trademark had been forgotten, and be unable to do a moment’s work until someone went back and got it.” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
“The first three-reel picture was a great sensation. Nearly everyone in the business said that the public would never sit through so long a picture regardless of how good it was. In theses days when many a story that could be told in one reel is put into five, it seems funny to recall those remarks about ‘long’ pictures. This picture was ‘Ten Nights In a Bar Room’ and, we thought, cost a fabulous sum. But the scenery was so flimsy that whenever a door was closed the whole set would shake. However, nobody noticed a little thing like that.” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
“Someday, I may get a chance to try with all the best in me to ‘put over’ the ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’ so that people will feel the real romance and humor of it all as I do.” — Kathlyn Williams
Source: Frances Denton (1917)
