Elsie Ferguson - Stardom

Stardom

At the peak of her popularity, several film studios offered her a contract but she declined them all until widely respected New York-based French director, Maurice Tourneur, proposed she appear in the lead role as a sophisticated patrician in his 1917 silent film, Barbary Sheep. She also may have consented to films because she no longer had the protection of her beloved Broadway employers Henry B. Harris, who died on the Titanic and Charles Frohman, who perished on the Lusitania in May 1915. Producer and director Adolph Zukor then signed her to an eighteen film, 3 year, $5,000.00 per week contract.

Following this first film, Ferguson was highly billed in promotional campaigns, and starred in two more films directed by Tourneur under a lucrative contract from Paramount Pictures that paid her $1,000 per day of filming in addition to her weekly contract income. Her only surviving silent film is The Witness for the Defense (1919) co-starring Warner Oland and performed as a play in 1911 by her friend Ethel Barrymore.

Continuing to play roles of elegant society women, Ferguson was quickly dubbed "The Aristocrat of the Silent Screen", but the aristocratic label was also because she was known as a difficult and sometimes arrogant personality with whom to work. Many of the films she agreed to do were because they were adaptations of stage plays with which she was familiar.

Elsie Ferguson eventually followed the move west and bought a home in the hills of Hollywood, California. In 1920, she traveled to the Middle East and Europe. She fell in love with Paris and the French Riviera and within a few years bought a permanent home there.

In 1921, she accepted another contract offer from Paramount Pictures to star in four films to be spread over a two-year period. One of these was the 1921 film entitled Forever in which she starred opposite the leading heartthrob of the day, Wallace Reid.