Can You Name This Character Actress?

Here are four photographs of a Hollywood contract player, several years before she became a well known MGM feature player in many films during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

She was born on February 24, 1890 as Mary Tomlinson in Acton, Indiana.

Dressed to the nines – circa 1918

Photo via the New York Public Library.  c. 1920s

Photo: Apeda studio possibly from the 1918 play “Yes Or No”

The next photo should give it away.

With actor Billy Bevan in The Wrong Road (1937)

Do you have it yet?

Yes, it’s the star of a dozen Ma and Pa Kettle movies, Marjorie Main.

Usually thought of as plain and matronly, Marjorie was attractive enough to be cast on the Broadway stage, appearing in plays from the mid-1910s until the late 1930s.  Marjorie’s first film was a 1929 short entitled Harry Fox and His Six American Beauties. And yes, Marjorie played one of the beauties. She would make 87 more films, the final one being a Ma and Pa Kettle movie in 1957.

Marjorie’s co-stars reported one very strange quirk about her. Between takes and occasionally during a take, Marjorie would have conversations with her husband Stanley Krebs who she had married in 1921. The only thing was, Stanley had been dead since 1935. But Marjorie talked to him as if he were there and would also bring the urn with his ashes into the studio commissary, order a separate meal for Stanley, and converse with the urn.

Marjorie Main died at age 85 on April 10, 1975 in Hollywood, CA..