Early Life and Stage Career
She was born near Baltimore, Maryland, the third of four daughters of John W. Glaum (July 9, 1856–July 7, 1934) and Lena Katherine Kuhn (December 30, 1863–July 1, 1946). Her sisters were Hattie Helen "Phyllis" Glaum (September 7, 1884–February 4, 1941); Lena K. Glaum (December 22, 1887–January 15, 1971); and Margaret Olive Glaum (October 11, 1896–June 18, 1911).
Her father was born as Johannes Wilhelm Glaum in Germany, emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1869, and lived in Indiana, then Prince George's County, Maryland, while her mother was born in New York to German-born parents. John and Lena Glaum and family moved to Southern California in the late 1890s, and lived in Pasadena for several years before moving into Los Angeles. Louise attended Berendo School on South Berendo Street in Pico Heights.
Glaum began her acting career in stock and stage productions. She was in the cast of Crucifixus, a Passion play, which opened on November 12, 1907, at the Gamut Auditorium, 1044 South Hope Street, in Los Angeles, before a good-sized audience. In early June 1908, she appeared in the Owen Davis play How Baxter Butted In, a melodramatic comedy, at the Los Angeles Theatre on Spring Steet. The cast included Lulu Warrenton and a number of others. Glaum then toured as an ingenue with a road show in Why Girls Leave Home. She earned $25 a week and furnished her own gowns, which she made herself. After reaching Chicago, she played ingenues in the Imperial Stock Company there for a year and a half, appearing in The Lion and the Mouse and The Squaw Man, among other plays. While performing in a summer stock engagement in Toledo, she created the ingenue role in Officer 666. Its playwright, Augustin MacHugh, her stage director in Toledo, tried it out there before Broadway ever saw the successful farce.
Upon the death of her younger sister, Margaret, in June 1911, Glaum resigned and returned home to Los Angeles. On July 29, the Los Angeles Times read, "Louise Glaum, ingenue, who made her professional start here a few years ago, is at home on a short visit. Of late she has been playing in Chicago."
Her mother wanted her to remain, but the desire to return to the stage possessed her. She compromised, however; while acting as the ingenue in a local theatre company, she began making the rounds of the movie studios.
Read more about this topic: Louise Glaum
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, stage and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I do not know that I meet, in any of my Walks, Objects which move both my Spleen and Laughter so effectually, as those Young Fellows ... who rise early for no other Purpose but to publish their Laziness.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“There is probably not more than one hundred dollars in cash in circulation today. That is, if you were to call in all the bills and silver and gold in the country at noon tomorrow and pile them on the table, you would find that you had just about one hundred dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and a few peppermint Life Savers.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)