While many film buffs have long held that Florence Turner was the first movie star, there is evidence that Maurice Costello should have that designation. Of course, "movie star" is hard to define, especially in the silent film era when the term wasn't widely used, but Costello took first place in a 1912 poll in Motion Picture Story Magazine, garnering more votes than Florence Lawrence and Florence Turner combined.
Shulman argues that “what D. W. Griffith did for film direction […], Maurice did for screen acting: that is, he raised the bar to a higher standard that quickly became the norm. And he did it a year before Griffith, who didn’t come work for Biograph until 1908.” Maurice transformed how players acted in front of the camera. Because cranking speeds varied by cameraperson, just as projection speeds varied by cinema, there was a wide range of movement on the silent screen. Some exhibitors even sped up their prints so as to fit more screenings into a day. As Shulman shows, Maurice was hailed — locally in the Pittsburgh Gazette and nationally in Photoplay — as the star who implemented a slower style of acting that played back onscreen more realistically. By 1910, Vitagraph was billing Maurice as the star of the program, with promotional blurbs such as, “A Vitagraph Night with Maurice Costello.” Helene and Dolores were also getting screen time as extras whenever children were needed.
Helene and Dolores were Maurice Costello's daughters, who went on to be movie stars in their own right. Dolores married John Barrymore and Helene starred in the first all-taking feature film, but they had plenty of other accomplishments and scandals, as did Maurice. Read more about the Costello film family in a synopsis of the book Film’s First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos by Terry Shulman at the Los Angeles Review of Books. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Cinema News)
