Two Troupers Born 150 Years Ago Today: Lulu Glaser and E. Alyn Warren

Two old time actors of note were born on June 2, 1874.

Lulu Glaser came from Pennsylvania Dutch stock. She was only 17 when she began to show up in New York stage productions, initially under the banner of Francis Wilson. Her New York stage credits include The Lion Tamer (1891), Erminie (1893 and 1899), Cyrano de Bergerac(1899, as Roxane to Wilson’s Cyrano), and as the title characters in Sweet Anne Page (1900), The Prima Donna (1901), Dolly Varden (1902), A Madcap Princess (1904, as Mary Tudor), Miss Dolly Dollars (1905), and Lola from Berlin (1907). She married her co-star in the latter show Ralph C. Herz, that same year. She then went on to The Merry Widow Burlesque (1908), Mlle, Mischief (1908), and The Girl and the Kaiser (1910-11).

In 1912, Glaser divorced Herz, and her career seems to shift. She appeared in two 1913 newsreels, one with Marie Dressler in a profile of stage stars, and another entertaining friends in Golden Gate Park. She played herself in the 1915 feature film How Molly Malone Made Good, and starred in the 1916 comedy Love’s Pilgrimage to America for Universal. The latter part of her career seems to have been spent performing in vaudeville. There is a terrific spread of her cabinet cards here, and an even better one here. Glaser was living in Fairfield County, CT at the time of her death in 1958.

I first took note of E. Alyn Warren while working on two recent posts, both of which concerned films in which Warren appeared in 1930: The Medicine Man with Jack Benny, in which Warren played a cruel German father, and Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, in which he played Ulysses S. Grant. Warren would also play Grant in Secret Service (1931) and Operator 13 (1934).

Warren was in over 100 films. I had seen a good many of them without taking particular notice of him, for he was a character actor with a chameleon-like quality, often cast in “foreigner” roles. In about a fifth of his movies he was cast as a Chinese or otherwise Asian character as in The Cat’s Paw (1934) with Harold Lloyd and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) with Boris Karloff. He was clearly well-liked by Tod Browning, who cast him in The Virgin of Stamboul (1920), The Unholy Three (1925), The Devil Doll (1936) and Miracles for Sale (1939). Other notable films included The Courtship of Miles Standish (1923), in which he played the title character, Sweet Rosie O’Grady (1926), and two versions of East is West (1922 and 1930). One of his very last appearances was as a walk-on as Frank Kennedy’s clerk in Gone with the Wind (1939). His turn as “Pop”, the stage door monitor in Broadway Melody of 1940 was his last gasp. He died in January of that year.

For more on the history of show business,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on silent film please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.