Source: Link

KOERBER, LEILA MARIA (Hoppert), known as Marie Dressler, actor; b. 9 Nov. 1868 in Cobourg, Ont., younger of the two daughters of Alexander Rudolph Koerber, a music teacher, and Anne (Anna) Henderson; m. 6 May 1894 George Francis Hoppert (Hoeppert, Hopper) (d. 1929) in Jersey City, N.J.; they divorced in 1896; partner of James Henry Dalton (d. 1921); d. 28 July 1934 in Santa Barbara, Calif., and was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, Calif.

Marie Dressler lived a roller coaster of a life. She had enormous success on the vaudeville stage after years in stock companies and then faced a period of dire financial straits before finding Academy Award–winning film stardom.

Born in 1868, Marie would later claim to have been born in 1869 and 1871. She took the stage name of Dressler – possibly the name of an aunt – in part to separate herself from her father, whose lack of dependability had obliged the family to move from town to town in search of work for him. Father and daughter were estranged by the time that the teenaged Marie and her sister, Bonita Louise, left their home (then in the United States) to join the Nevada Stock Company, a travelling dramatic troupe. Already five foot seven and large-bodied, with greenish-blue eyes and red hair, Dressler was, in her own words, “too homely for a prima donna and too big for a soubrette.” Yet she supported herself, at times barely, by acting and singing for the next ten years throughout America’s heartland. In 1892 she arrived in New York with her style of broad comedy firmly established. There she won fame through the light operas she appeared in with the popular Lillian Russell, such as Princess Nicotine (1893), and the operatic comedy The lady slavey (1896), which played for two sold-out years before going on tour. She had sent money to her parents even when she was earning just a few dollars a week, and after her success in New York she brought them from Michigan to live with her. She still had a problematic relationship with her father but was devoted to her mother.

In 1894 she met and married George Hoppert, who was employed by the Lillian Russell Light Opera Company, with which Dressler was then working. Following the ceremony in New Jersey, which her parents attended, the newlyweds returned to New York for their honeymoon. Any illusions Dressler may have had were quickly dispelled when, the morning after her marriage, a woman claiming to be Hoppert’s wife accosted him as he was leaving their hotel. Hoppert soon began going back and forth between the two women. Marie filed for divorce after two years.

In 1904 Dressler signed a three-year, $50,000-dollar contract with actor and producer Joseph Morris (Joe) Weber, who had just broken with his partner, actor-manager Lewis Maurice (Lew) Fields. Singing songs such as “A great big girl like me” (in Higgledy-Piggledy, 1904), Dressler became a vaudeville sensation and a sought-after guest in New York society. She would later explain her popularity by saying, “I’m the outlet for the tired man’s brain.… He finds relaxation in seeing me make a fool of myself.” When her contract with Weber ended, she was hired by Fields and attained stardom as the oversized ugly duckling Tillie (Tillie’s nightmare, 1909), a character she would milk for more than a decade. The comedy’s most popular song, “Heaven will protect the working girl,” would become a signature tune.

At the peak of her stage popularity, Dressler sabotaged herself by taking off for weeks and months at a time. Her attempts at producing her own shows in England, San Francisco, and other locales almost always met with failure. She filed for bankruptcy in 1901 and 1909. Although she thought of herself as an entrepreneur and started a variety of ventures, her greatest successes always unfolded under the tutelage of others. In 1914 she went to Los Angeles to film Tillie’s punctured romance, co-starring Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand, for director Michael Sennett*, known as Mack Sennett, at a salary of $2,500 a week for 14 weeks. However, the picture, though well received, did not lead to much work in front of the camera.

Around 1907 James Henry Dalton, a man of uncertain background, had entered Dressler’s life. His occupation for the next dozen years appears to have been attaching himself to her projects. Dressler went through a form of marriage ceremony with him, but the “minister” was someone Dalton had hired to play the role. Shortly after Dressler learned the truth, Dalton suffered a diabetic stroke and she found it impossible, she would later say, to “set him adrift.” Upon his death in Chicago in 1921, three men arrived at the funeral home with orders to remove his body and return him to his long-abandoned wife.

After America entered the First World War in 1917, Dressler threw herself into war work at her own expense. Her fame was such that she joined Mary Pickford [Gladys Louise Smith*], Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks at the White House in 1918 to kick off a nationwide tour to sell the third issue of war bonds. When she returned to Broadway in 1919, however, her salary was just $1,500 a week, compared with the $2,500 she had commanded before. It did not help her reputation with theatre producers when, outraged over their shabby treatment of chorus girls, she became president of the Chorus Equity Association of America on 12 August that year. The union joined the Actors’ Equity Association in a strike, which ended a month later and was successful in bringing about improved working conditions.

The following year Dressler tried to stage her own version of Tillie’s nightmare, but it was an expensive failure. The coming of the Jazz Age, with its emphasis on youth and glamour, made her form of comedy – mugging, bumbling across the stage, using her large body to comic effect, and stealing every scene she was in – out of date. She fell into depression after Dalton’s death, and several trips to Europe, often supported by her society friends, failed to give her the direction and sense of purpose she craved. As she would put it later in life, “My courage, like my bank account, had run low. I was frightened and terribly restless.” By the mid 1920s her continued starts and stops in various productions had sent her into near poverty.

Dressler pretended to most that all was well, but a mutual friend wrote to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriter Frances Marion about the actor’s financial problems. As a young journalist in San Francisco, Marion had met Marie when the latter was on tour in the early 1910s. They had become close when Dressler tended to Marion following her sister’s suicide in 1916, and that year Marion wrote Tillie wakes up (1917), Dressler’s first successful follow-up film to Tillie’s punctured romance. From the friend’s letter, Marion learned that Dressler was so desperate that she was contemplating moving to Europe for good to run a hotel or become a housekeeper. Marion brought Dressler to the attention of MGM production chief Irving Grant Thalberg. He agreed to put her on salary, and Marion then prepared the script for The Callahans and the Murphys (1927), which starred Dressler and comedian Polly Moran. The movie was an initial success, but protests by the Irish-American community and the Roman Catholic Church against what they considered to be insulting situations in the film resulted in its being pulled from distribution. Dressler was placed in a series of supporting roles. When Marion was adapting Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie for Greta Garbo’s first sound film (1930), she again went to bat for Dressler, promoting her for the part of Marthy Owens, a worn-out waterfront drunk. In this dramatic role, Dressler found renewed celebrity. Her success shocked her as well as everyone else who thought they knew what made a leading lady. The sixtyish, 200-pound Dressler worked steadily thereafter. Her starring role in Min and Bill (1930), also written for her by Marion, won her the best-actress award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1931. The box-office success of Min and Bill and the Dressler feature Tugboat Annie (1933) was such that MGM was the only major studio able to stay out of the red as the Great Depression hit Hollywood full force. Helping as well were two other Dressler films of 1933: Dinner at eight, with her scene-stealing role as the faded star Carlotta Vance, and Christopher Bean. The following year, on 28 July, she succumbed in Santa Barbara to the cancer that she had battled for a number of years, with several doctors and friends, including Frances Marion, at her bedside.

Dressler is commemorated in Canada by Cobourg’s Marie Dressler House, where she was born and where the Canadian Women in Film Museum has an exhibit devoted to her. Outside, an Ontario Heritage Foundation plaque recognizes her achievements. The Marie Dressler Foundation, dedicated to her memory, annually presents the Vintage Film Festival, which features Dressler’s movies and others of her era. In 2008 Canada Post issued a stamp in the actor’s honour.

Cari Beauchamp