Louise Lester: First Female Western Star

August 8 was the natal day of Louise Lester (1867-1952), widely regarded as the first female star of westerns. She starred in films for the Flying A studio in pictures with names like Crazy Gulch and The Boss of Lucky Ranch as early as 1911, a full six years before Texas Guinan began making her westerns.

Initially her look and her roles were more gender normative, as the photo above indicates, as do the titles of films, such as The Elopement of Double L Ranch, The Witch of the Range, The Actress and the Cowboys, Cupid in Chaps, Auntie and the Cowboys, and The Mother of the Ranch. In 1912, she introduced the character of Calamity Anne, obviously a riff of Calamity Jane, a rough, tough, feisty female in conventional cowboy clothes, and this became her most successful professional gambit, running as a series between 1913 and 1917. But she was in tons of other films besides, appearing in over 200 of them through 1925, most of them obviously one-reelers. Towards the end, she was more of a supporting player. You can see her for example in John Ford’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919) with Harry Carey.

In the sound era, she appeared in but three films as a walk-on, the last of them being Straight from the Heart (1935) with Mary Astor, directed by her son Scott Beal, who had been an a.d. on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). Her husband was actor/director Frank Beal.

Born in Milwaukee, Lester had years of stage experience before stepping before the cameras, touring the midwest with opera companies. She was 44 years old when she launched her movie career — pretty remarkable when you consider the vigorous physical nature of the films she made.

For more on silent filmplease read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.