1930 Glamorous Smoking Betty Compson Photograph E. R. Richee Art Deco
Item History & Price
ITEM: This is a vintage and original Paramount Pictures production still photograph of petite, fair-haired, beautiful, and highly paid silent film leading lady Betty Compson. Aptly nicknamed "The Prettiest Girl in Pictures", this portrait of Compson as a smoking, bow-lipped flapper bad girl was taken by Eugene Robert Richee in promotion of her 1930 pre-Code Western film "The Spoilers."
Photograph measures 8" x 10" on a glossy single weight paper stock with ink stamps... and notations on verso.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
More about Betty Compson:
A mining engineer's daughter, blond, blue-eyed Betty Compson began in show business playing violin in a Salt Lake City vaudeville establishment for $15 a week. Following that, she went on tour, accompanied by her mother, with an act called 'the Vagabond Violinist'. Aged eighteen, she appeared on the Alexander Pantages Theatre Circuit, again doing her violin solo vaudeville routine, and was spotted there by comedy producer Al Christie. Christie quickly changed her stage name from Eleanor to Betty. For the next few years, she turned out a steady stream of one-reel and two-reel slapstick comedies, frequently paired with Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle.
In 1919, Betty was signed by writer-director George Loane Tucker to co-star opposite Lon Chaney as Rose in The Miracle Man (1919). The film was a huge critical and financial success and established Betty Compson as a major star at Paramount (under contract from 1921 to 1925). One of the more highly paid performers of the silent screen, her weekly earnings exceeded $5000 a week at the peak of her career. She came to own a fleet of luxury limousines and was able to move from a bungalow in the hills overlooking Hollywood to an expensive mansion on Hollywood Boulevard. From 1921, Betty also owned her own production company. She went on to make several films in England between 1923 and 1924 for the director Graham Cutts.
During the late 1920's, Betty appeared in a variety of dramatic and comedic roles. She received good reviews acting opposite George Bancroft as a waterfront prostitute in The Docks of New York (1928), and was even nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a carnival girl in The Barker (1928). She gave a touching performance in The Great Gabbo (1929), directed by her then husband James Cruze, as the assistant of a demented ventriloquist (Erich von Stroheim), with whom she is unhappily in love. That same year, she appeared in RKO's first sound film, Street Girl (1929), and was briefly under contract to that studio, cast in so-called 'women's pictures' such as The Lady Refuses (1931) and Three Who Loved (1931).
The stature of her roles began to diminish from the mid 1930s, though she continued to act in character parts until 1948. Betty's personal fortunes also declined. This came about primarily as a result of her marital contract to the alcoholic Cruze, whom she had divorced in 1929. For several years, Cruze had failed to pay his income tax and Betty (linked financially to Cruze) ended up being sued by the federal government to the tune of $150, 000. This forced her to sell her Hollywood villa, her cars and her antiques. In later years, Betty Compson developed her own cosmetics label and ran a business in California producing personalized ashtrays for the hospitality industry.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
More about Eugene Robert Richee:
Eugene (sometimes also just called Gene) Robert Richee was born August 21, 1896 in Denver, Colorado. Richee began his career in the silent movie era. He got his job at Paramount in the late teens through his friend Clarence Sinclair Bull. He started shooting stars while Donald Biddle Keyes was taking portraits in the gallery. When Keyes left Paramount, Richee took over, and for two decades he photographed the studio's stars including Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Claudette Colbert, Fredrick March, the Marx Brothers and Carole Lombard. Lombard so admired his work with Dietrich that she started posing in some of the same ways to get that 'glamour mysterious' look.
Richee was the perfect technician for Joseph Von Sternberg, who controlled Dietrich's career. All sittings were supervised by von Sternberg for the lighting setups, and directed the action just as he did on the studio floor. When Dietrich's collaboration with Von Sternberg ended, Richee continued to take her portraits, which retained the look of the von Sternberg originals. It could be said that Richee learned plenty from the great director that he used for many of his own stills.
He took portrait photographs of stars on the sets of some of Paramount Pictures most well known classics. As his talent became more and more prevalent, he was put in charge of the main portrait gallery at Paramount. He worked with a talented coterie of associates including William Walling and Don English. Richee remains the least examined among the top Hollywood photographers although he was one of the finest--one needs to look no further than his sensational portraits of Paramount stars like Anna Mae Wong, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich among others.
From 1925 to 1935 took many photographs of Louise Brooks. Perhaps Richee's most famous work is a 1928 portrait of Louise Brooks wearing a long string of pearls. Few photos capture better the zeitgeist of the Roaring '20s. Simplicity is the hallmark of this photograph, along with masterful composition. Brooks stands, face in profile and wearing a long-sleeved black dress, against a black background, her face hands and pearls along illuminated. Her bob, with its razor-sharp line across the white skin of her jaw, was widely copied and became one of the last century's most potent fashion statements. Brook's career had intermittent highs and lows, but she was one of Hollywood's great portrait subjects and was never better served than by Richee.
Even a tireless researcher like Kobal had difficulty uncovering biographical information about Richee, and it is only after Kobal's death that a few details have emerged about Richee's life including his 1896 birth in Colorado. He started at Paramount in 1921 and stayed there twenty years, after which he took a job at Warner Brothers. Richee died in 1972, just before Kobal began exploring seriously the careers of Hollywood portrait photographers. Like Ruth Harriet Louise, Richee left scant biographical information behind but, again like Louise, he left a corpus of extraordinary work that may be seen as emblematic of the best of Hollywood photography.
Richee was an inventive photographer and when working with starlets he sometime incorporated props made of plastic, glass or even mirrors, giving his prints a sparkling reflective quality. Portraits of the top stars always had a sheen that was consistent with the studio's image of smart sophistication. When he photographed Clara Bow, the studio's number one sexpot took on a polished veneer. Richee has the distinction of being the first photographer to record Veronica Lake and her distinctive blonde locks in his portraits for 'I Wanated Wings' (1940), the film that brought her worldwide fame.
Gary Cooper had made more than thirty films over five years when he was cast in 1930 as Dietrich's first Paramount co-star in 'Morocco' (1930). He was the first male Hollywood star to bridge the opposing forces of masculinity and beauty. Plenty of handsome men had great careers before Cooper, but none so perfectly fused with what had always been considered opposites. Richee photographed him extensively, beginning when he was a touch too beautiful for a young man, and followed his transformation to the exemplar of male virility. According to Bob Coburn, who worked principally at Columbia, Cooper was 'embarrassed a little bit at constantly being photographed. He preferred to be in movement in front of the camera.'
At the top of his game and for unknown reasons, Richee left Paramount in 1941 to go to Warner Brothers. A. L. 'Whitey' Schafer, who had been in the top position at Columbia, replaced Richee. This change indicated that Paramount's image was shifting away from the opulent glamour that had typified publicity material released during the two previous decades.
Richee later worked for MGM and Warner Brothers. In his role, Richee became the premiere photographer of stars such as Dorothy Lamour, Jean Arthur, Mae West, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray, William Powell, Irene Dunne, Veronica Lake, Fredrick March, Nancy Carroll, Gloria Swanson, and Carole Lombard.
Some stars became so accustomed to Richee they wanted only to work with him. Miriam Hopkins was one of them. It was said she was quite curt and figidity when Richee was working elsewhere and she had to be photographed instead by William Walling. Walling says: "She was being difficult from the moment she arrived, because Richee was not there."
Oddly enough, Dietrich herself was much more pleasant when she found out that Richee was on vacation and she would have to be photographed by Walling. Of course, Von Sternberg was with her.
Virgil Apger, Richee's assistant (and brother-in-law) developed Richee's negatives, worked on with the dryers, and made prints. He recalled: "Gene never left a sitting with fewer than a hundred negatives, which had to be retouched and printed." Retouching was the norm by then for all photographers in Hollywood.
Richee passed away on April 21, 1972 in Orange County, California. He was survived by his wife, Levaughn Larson.
Biography From: Vintage Movie Star Photos, A Flair for Portraits: Eugene Robert Richee
Photograph measures 8" x 10" on a glossy single weight paper stock with ink stamps... and notations on verso.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
More about Betty Compson:
A mining engineer's daughter, blond, blue-eyed Betty Compson began in show business playing violin in a Salt Lake City vaudeville establishment for $15 a week. Following that, she went on tour, accompanied by her mother, with an act called 'the Vagabond Violinist'. Aged eighteen, she appeared on the Alexander Pantages Theatre Circuit, again doing her violin solo vaudeville routine, and was spotted there by comedy producer Al Christie. Christie quickly changed her stage name from Eleanor to Betty. For the next few years, she turned out a steady stream of one-reel and two-reel slapstick comedies, frequently paired with Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle.
In 1919, Betty was signed by writer-director George Loane Tucker to co-star opposite Lon Chaney as Rose in The Miracle Man (1919). The film was a huge critical and financial success and established Betty Compson as a major star at Paramount (under contract from 1921 to 1925). One of the more highly paid performers of the silent screen, her weekly earnings exceeded $5000 a week at the peak of her career. She came to own a fleet of luxury limousines and was able to move from a bungalow in the hills overlooking Hollywood to an expensive mansion on Hollywood Boulevard. From 1921, Betty also owned her own production company. She went on to make several films in England between 1923 and 1924 for the director Graham Cutts.
During the late 1920's, Betty appeared in a variety of dramatic and comedic roles. She received good reviews acting opposite George Bancroft as a waterfront prostitute in The Docks of New York (1928), and was even nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a carnival girl in The Barker (1928). She gave a touching performance in The Great Gabbo (1929), directed by her then husband James Cruze, as the assistant of a demented ventriloquist (Erich von Stroheim), with whom she is unhappily in love. That same year, she appeared in RKO's first sound film, Street Girl (1929), and was briefly under contract to that studio, cast in so-called 'women's pictures' such as The Lady Refuses (1931) and Three Who Loved (1931).
The stature of her roles began to diminish from the mid 1930s, though she continued to act in character parts until 1948. Betty's personal fortunes also declined. This came about primarily as a result of her marital contract to the alcoholic Cruze, whom she had divorced in 1929. For several years, Cruze had failed to pay his income tax and Betty (linked financially to Cruze) ended up being sued by the federal government to the tune of $150, 000. This forced her to sell her Hollywood villa, her cars and her antiques. In later years, Betty Compson developed her own cosmetics label and ran a business in California producing personalized ashtrays for the hospitality industry.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
More about Eugene Robert Richee:
Eugene (sometimes also just called Gene) Robert Richee was born August 21, 1896 in Denver, Colorado. Richee began his career in the silent movie era. He got his job at Paramount in the late teens through his friend Clarence Sinclair Bull. He started shooting stars while Donald Biddle Keyes was taking portraits in the gallery. When Keyes left Paramount, Richee took over, and for two decades he photographed the studio's stars including Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Claudette Colbert, Fredrick March, the Marx Brothers and Carole Lombard. Lombard so admired his work with Dietrich that she started posing in some of the same ways to get that 'glamour mysterious' look.
Richee was the perfect technician for Joseph Von Sternberg, who controlled Dietrich's career. All sittings were supervised by von Sternberg for the lighting setups, and directed the action just as he did on the studio floor. When Dietrich's collaboration with Von Sternberg ended, Richee continued to take her portraits, which retained the look of the von Sternberg originals. It could be said that Richee learned plenty from the great director that he used for many of his own stills.
He took portrait photographs of stars on the sets of some of Paramount Pictures most well known classics. As his talent became more and more prevalent, he was put in charge of the main portrait gallery at Paramount. He worked with a talented coterie of associates including William Walling and Don English. Richee remains the least examined among the top Hollywood photographers although he was one of the finest--one needs to look no further than his sensational portraits of Paramount stars like Anna Mae Wong, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich among others.
From 1925 to 1935 took many photographs of Louise Brooks. Perhaps Richee's most famous work is a 1928 portrait of Louise Brooks wearing a long string of pearls. Few photos capture better the zeitgeist of the Roaring '20s. Simplicity is the hallmark of this photograph, along with masterful composition. Brooks stands, face in profile and wearing a long-sleeved black dress, against a black background, her face hands and pearls along illuminated. Her bob, with its razor-sharp line across the white skin of her jaw, was widely copied and became one of the last century's most potent fashion statements. Brook's career had intermittent highs and lows, but she was one of Hollywood's great portrait subjects and was never better served than by Richee.
Even a tireless researcher like Kobal had difficulty uncovering biographical information about Richee, and it is only after Kobal's death that a few details have emerged about Richee's life including his 1896 birth in Colorado. He started at Paramount in 1921 and stayed there twenty years, after which he took a job at Warner Brothers. Richee died in 1972, just before Kobal began exploring seriously the careers of Hollywood portrait photographers. Like Ruth Harriet Louise, Richee left scant biographical information behind but, again like Louise, he left a corpus of extraordinary work that may be seen as emblematic of the best of Hollywood photography.
Richee was an inventive photographer and when working with starlets he sometime incorporated props made of plastic, glass or even mirrors, giving his prints a sparkling reflective quality. Portraits of the top stars always had a sheen that was consistent with the studio's image of smart sophistication. When he photographed Clara Bow, the studio's number one sexpot took on a polished veneer. Richee has the distinction of being the first photographer to record Veronica Lake and her distinctive blonde locks in his portraits for 'I Wanated Wings' (1940), the film that brought her worldwide fame.
Gary Cooper had made more than thirty films over five years when he was cast in 1930 as Dietrich's first Paramount co-star in 'Morocco' (1930). He was the first male Hollywood star to bridge the opposing forces of masculinity and beauty. Plenty of handsome men had great careers before Cooper, but none so perfectly fused with what had always been considered opposites. Richee photographed him extensively, beginning when he was a touch too beautiful for a young man, and followed his transformation to the exemplar of male virility. According to Bob Coburn, who worked principally at Columbia, Cooper was 'embarrassed a little bit at constantly being photographed. He preferred to be in movement in front of the camera.'
At the top of his game and for unknown reasons, Richee left Paramount in 1941 to go to Warner Brothers. A. L. 'Whitey' Schafer, who had been in the top position at Columbia, replaced Richee. This change indicated that Paramount's image was shifting away from the opulent glamour that had typified publicity material released during the two previous decades.
Richee later worked for MGM and Warner Brothers. In his role, Richee became the premiere photographer of stars such as Dorothy Lamour, Jean Arthur, Mae West, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray, William Powell, Irene Dunne, Veronica Lake, Fredrick March, Nancy Carroll, Gloria Swanson, and Carole Lombard.
Some stars became so accustomed to Richee they wanted only to work with him. Miriam Hopkins was one of them. It was said she was quite curt and figidity when Richee was working elsewhere and she had to be photographed instead by William Walling. Walling says: "She was being difficult from the moment she arrived, because Richee was not there."
Oddly enough, Dietrich herself was much more pleasant when she found out that Richee was on vacation and she would have to be photographed by Walling. Of course, Von Sternberg was with her.
Virgil Apger, Richee's assistant (and brother-in-law) developed Richee's negatives, worked on with the dryers, and made prints. He recalled: "Gene never left a sitting with fewer than a hundred negatives, which had to be retouched and printed." Retouching was the norm by then for all photographers in Hollywood.
Richee passed away on April 21, 1972 in Orange County, California. He was survived by his wife, Levaughn Larson.
Biography From: Vintage Movie Star Photos, A Flair for Portraits: Eugene Robert Richee
