Early Life
Miller was born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest daughter of Edwin D. Reynolds, a telephone lineman, and his first wife, the former Ada Lynn Thompson. The tiny, delicate-featured blonde beauty was only four years old when, as "Mademoiselle Sugarlump," she debuted at Lakeside Park in Dayton, Ohio as a member of her family's vaudeville act, the Columbian Trio, which then included Marilyn's step-father, Oscar Caro Miller, and two older sisters, Ruth and Claire. They were re-christened the Five Columbians after Marilyn and her mother joined the routine. From their home base in Findlay, Ohio, they toured the Midwest and Europe in variety for ten years, skirting the child labor authorities, before Lee Shubert discovered Marilyn at the Lotus Club in London in 1914.
Read more about this topic: Marilyn Miller
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“Oh sure, everyone goes back to the earth at some point, but life itself is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that’s what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)