Peg Entwistle facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Peg Entwistle
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Entwistle from Just to Remind You theatrical production (1929)
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| Born |
Millicent Lilian Entwistle
5 February 1908 |
| Died | 16 September 1932 (aged 24) Hollywood, California, US
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| Cause of death | ... by jumping off the Hollywoodland Sign |
| Resting place | Oak Hill Cemetery, Glendale, Ohio, US |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1925–1932 |
| Spouse(s) |
Robert Keith
(m. 1927; div. 1929) |
Millicent Lilian "Peg" Entwistle (5 February 1908 – 16 September 1932) was a British stage and screen actress. She began her stage career in 1925, appearing in several Broadway productions. She appeared in only one film, Thirteen Women, which was released posthumously.
Entwistle gained notoriety after she jumped to her death from atop the "H" on the Hollywoodland sign in September 1932, at the age of 24.
Early life
Born Millicent Lilian Entwistle in Port Talbot, Glamorgan, Wales, to English parents Emily Entwistle (née Stevenson) and Robert Symes Entwistle, an actor, she spent her early life in West Kensington, London.
It is often reported that her mother died when she was very young, but there is no documented evidence supporting this.
Peg Entwistle reportedly immigrated to America, sailing from Liverpool aboard the S.S. Philadelphia in 1916, and settled in New York City. However, documents and photographs made available by the Entwistle family for a biography state that Entwistle and her father were in Cincinnati, Ohio, and New York City in early spring 1913. This information is also corroborated by the Internet Broadway Database, and The New York Times, where Robert S. Entwistle is listed in the cast of several plays in 1913.
In December 1922, Robert Entwistle died, the victim of a hit-and-run motorist on Park Avenue and 72nd Street in New York City. Peg and her two younger half-brothers were taken in by their uncle, who had come with them to New York and was the manager of Broadway actor Walter Hampden.
Broadway
By 1925, Entwistle was living in Boston as a student of Henry Jewett's Repertory (now called the Huntington Theatre) and was one of the Henry Jewett Players, who were gaining national attention. Walter Hampden gave Entwistle an uncredited walk-on part in his Broadway production of Hamlet, which starred Ethel Barrymore. She carried the King's train and brought in the poison-cup. At age 17, Entwistle played the role of Hedvig in a 1925 production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck. After seeing the play, Bette Davis told her mother, "I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle." Some years later, Broadway actress and director Blanche Yurka sent a note to Davis asking if she would like to play Hedvig, and Davis sent word back that ever since she had seen Entwistle in The Wild Duck, she had known she would someday play Hedvig. Through the years, Davis said Entwistle was her inspiration to take up acting.
By 1926, Entwistle had been recruited by the New York Theatre Guild, and her first credited Broadway performance was in June of that year as Martha in The Man from Toronto, which opened at the Selywn Theatre and ran for 28 performances. Entwistle performed in ten Broadway plays as a member of the Theatre Guild between 1926 and 1932, working with noted actors such as George M. Cohan, William Gillette, Robert Cummings, Dorothy Gish, Hugh Sinclair, Henry Travers and Laurette Taylor. Her longest-running play was the 1927 hit Tommy, in which she starred with Sidney Toler, which ran for 232 performances and became the play for which she was most remembered.
The play The Uninvited Guest, closed after only seven performances in September 1927; however, The New York Times critic J. Brooks Atkinson wrote, "Peg Entwistle gave a performance considerably better than the play warranted."
She went on tour with the Theatre Guild between Broadway productions. Changing characters every week, Entwistle garnered some publicity, such as an article in the Sunday edition of The New York Times in 1927 and another in the Oakland Tribune two years later.
Aside from a part in the suspense drama Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of Miss Faulkner and her desire to play more challenging roles, Entwistle was often cast as a comedian, most often the attractive, good-hearted ingénue.
..... The show was cancelled, and in the aftermath, Entwistle and the other players were given only a week's salary, rather than a percentage of the box office gross, which had been agreed upon before the show opened.
Hollywood
By May 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression, Entwistle was in Los Angeles with a role in the Romney Brent play The Mad Hopes, starring Billie Burke, which ran from 23 May to 4 June at the Belasco Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.
After The Mad Hopes closed, Entwistle won her first and only credited film role with Radio Pictures (later RKO). Thirteen Women stars Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne in a pre-Hays code, high-budget thriller produced by David O. Selznick and drawn from the novel by Tiffany Thayer. Entwistle played a small supporting role as Hazel Cousins. It premiered on 14 October 1932, a month after her death, at the Roxy Theatre in New York City, and was released in Los Angeles on 11 November to neither critical nor commercial success. By the time it was re-released in 1935, 14 minutes had been cut from the film's original 73-minute running length. In 2008, Variety magazine cited Thirteen Women as one of the earliest "female ensemble" films.
Personal life
In April 1927, Entwistle married actor Robert Keith at the chapel of the New York City Clerk's office. She was granted a divorce in May 1929. Along with charges of cruelty, she claimed her husband did not tell her he had been married before and was father to a six-year-old boy, Brian Keith, who later became an actor.
Death
On 18 September 1932, a woman was hiking below the Hollywoodland sign, when she found a woman's shoe, purse, and jacket. ..... The woman reported her findings to the Los Angeles police and laid the items on the steps of the Hollywood police station.
Later, a detective and two radio car officers found the body in a ravine below the sign. Entwistle remained unidentified until her uncle, with whom she had been living in the Beachwood Canyon area, identified her remains. ..... He said that on Friday, 16 September, she had told him she was going for a walk to a drugstore and to see some friends. The police surmised that instead she made her way to the nearby southern slope of Mount Lee to the foot of the Hollywoodland sign, climbed a workman's ladder to the top of the "H" and jumped.
The cause of death was listed by the coroner as "multiple fractures of the pelvis."
Entwistle's death brought wide and often sensationalized publicity. Her funeral was held at the W.M. Strathers Mortuary, in Hollywood, on 20 September. Her body was cremated and the ashes were later sent to Glendale, Ohio, for burial next to her father in Oak Hill Cemetery, where they were interred on 5 January 1933.
In 2014, roughly 100 people marked the anniversary of Entwistle's death by gathering in the parking lot of Beachwood Market in Hollywood, to watch Thirteen Women on an outdoor screen. .....
Portrayals
She was portrayed by actress Laura Liguori in the 2017 short film Hollywood Girl: The Peg Entwistle Story.
Filmography
- Thirteen Women (1932) - Hazel Clay Cousins
See also
In Spanish: Peg Entwistle para niños
