Elsie Ferguson Broadway And Silent Film Star

Saying Elsie Ferguson (1883-1961) was “just” a star of the stage and screen is like saying Mickey Mantle was “just” a switch-hitting outfielder.

Elsie was one of the most beautiful and biggest stars on Broadway. “She is the shadow of beauty rather than beauty itself. She does not glow, she haunts,” a journalist said in 1914.

Elsie started her acting career in 1902 at the age of 16, and within just seven years, she made her way from the chorus to leading lady, starring in Channing Pollock’s 1909 comedy Such A Little Queen. In December 1916, an unnamed leading Broadway producer said, “There can be no doubt as to Elsie Ferguson’s supremacy on the stage.” He added that the actress had beauty, ability and versatility.

Elsie was courted by the movies, which for years she rejected as being inferior to the legitimate stage.  She eventually capitulated and decided to make films.

When Elsie finished her Broadway run as the title character in the play Shirley Kaye on March 10, 1917, theater critic Alexander Woollcott was very upset. Woollcott wrote of Elsie accepting a two year contract to make films in Hollywood and remarked:

“After this season’s work is done, this young, gifted and strikingly beautiful player will vanish into the movies. We cannot count on seeing Elsie Ferguson on our stage before the Fall of 1919.”

Woollcott then turns his disappointment into an acerbic indictment:

A deserter!

Elsie was well compensated, and appeared in about 25 films from 1917-1929. In the 1920’s Elsie would flip back and forth between the stage and film-making. At the height of her film career, she was earning as much as $9,000 per week, a fortune during the roaring twenties.

One of the main reasons Elsie is forgotten today is that only two of her films are known to exist. Her only sound film, Scarlet Pages is sometimes shown on Turner Classic Movies.

After retiring from the stage and screen in 1930, Elsie returned briefly to the Broadway stage in 1943 for a well received role in a play, Outrageous Fortune, which was written by her neighbor Rose Franken.

Elsie was considered for the lead in other plays, but this time she retired for good and split her time between France and a 100 acre farm estate known as White Gate Farms in Old Lyme, CT. Elsie spent her remaining years living happily tending the farm with her fourth husband Victor Egan whom she had married in 1934. Victor died in 1956. Elsie Ferguson died five years later at the age of 78 in New London, CT on November 15, 1961.

With no heirs, her will directed the bulk of her $1.5 – $2 million estate be split between New York City’s Animal Medical Center, Bide-A-Wee Home, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Orphans of the Storm.

Elsie Ferguson once said, “All the while, the middle classes and the lower classes, people are struggling and worrying and fretting their lives away over questions of food and education for their children and the wherewithal for the essentials of life. When a man has accumulated more than, say, a million, the monies made should revert back to those who have contributed to the amassment.”