What a Piece of Work Was Alice Mann

My word but there were a lot of Alices running around a century and more ago! I’ve always been interested in the phenomenon because it was my mother’s middle name, after her aunt, who herself was named after Alice Roosevelt (TR’s rascally daughter), and one has to guess the Lewis Carroll character has something to do with its popularity. Here on Travalanche we have already written about Alice Brady, Alice Davenport, Alice Day, Alice Faye, Alice Guy, Alice Howell, Alice Joyce, Alice Lake, Alice Lloyd, Alice Ward, Alice Washburn, Alice White, and Alice Zeppilli, and several more recent ones (e.g. Alice Ghostley) that seem to be holdovers from the previous era.

We only get to Alice Mann (1899-1986) so late in the game because her footprint was so small, around 30 films over a decade. Hailing from Greater Philadelphia she got her start at the Lubin studio as a teenager, where her older sister, the more prolific Frances (or “Frankie”) Mann (1892-1969) had worked since 1913. Alice appeared in comedies with Billie Reeves, Davy Don, and others before the studio closed in 1916. From there she went to Vitagraph in Brooklyn, supporting Jimmy Aubrey and Hughie Mack in comedies directed by Larry Semon (1916-17). This followed by three classic Fatty Arbuckle comedies at Comique: Coney Island, His Wedding Night, and Oh, Doctor! all in 1917.

When Vitagraph moved its operations to the West Coast, Mann managed to keep her career going closer to home in feature length films. These included the comedies A Pair of Sixes (1918) with Taylor Holmes, and Edward Dillon’sHelp! Help! Police! (1919) with George Walsh. She also starred in the drama The Water Lily (1919) and co-starred with Frankie (and her husband Donald Hall) in Fruits of Passion (1919). She supported Marguerite Clark in her final film Scrambled Wives (1921), then went on to appear in Perjury (1921) with William Farnum, The Family Closet (1921) withHolmes Herbert, and then (in quite a small role) in West of the Water Tower (1923) with Glenn Hunter and May McAvoy. Her last was the independent film Unrestrained Youth (1925).

Shortly after that, Mann had her second child (she’d married in 1921) and then sound came in, and she and the silver screen parted ways. Frankie’s movie career ended at the same time; Hall continued to act into the 1940s.

For more on silent movies please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.