Peg o' My Heart

Peg o' My Heart (1922)

PEG O MY HEART (Metro Studios, 1922), directed by King Vidor, under the supervision of J. Hartley Manners, introduces the legendary theatrical actress Laurette Taylor (1884-1946) to the screen reprising the role she made famous as a poor Irish farm girl who inherits a fortune but would rather have happiness instead. While a bit too old for the character supposedly in her late teens or early twenties, Laurette was tailor made for it.

Date of release
1922-12-17
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
King Vidor

Casting

Interesting facts

Peg o' My Heart is a 1922 American silent drama film directed by King Vidor and starring Laurette Taylor. It is based on the 1912 play written by Taylor's husband J. Hartley Manners. The play starred Laurette Taylor and famously ran a record number of performances on Broadway. Six reels of the original eight reels survive at the Library of Congress.

Production

After his short-lived “Vidor Village” studio closed, King Vidor abandoned independent film-making and sought work with the dominant film studios.

Producer Louis B. Mayer, soon to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered him the task of adapting the stage production Peg o’ My Heart stage version to film. This would be the first of three plays Vidor would make for Mayer.

The enormously popular Broadway actress Laurette Taylor who portrayed the “impish” Peg O’Connell, an 18-year-old Irish orphan girl, was cast to star in the film production and—at the age of thirty-eight (born 1884)—presented certain technical challenges.

The relatively insensitive film stock of the early 1920s required ample lighting to record images, and tended to reveal the chronological age of an actor.. Given these limitations, Vidor improvised with modified lens and succeeded in creating a sufficiently youthful screen appearance for Taylor. Vidor was not, however, able to suppress the stage mannerisms that Taylor had internalized during her lengthy Broadway career.

Taylor was delighted with Vidor's handling of the picture and frequently screened Peg o' My Heart at social gatherings, prompting guest actress Ethel Barrymore to warn Taylor that she would cease to attend her parties if she had to “sit through Peg o' My Heart again”.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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