Art of Make-Up

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 376, 9 June 1928, Page 25

Art of Make-Up

Ugliest Man on Screen

Secures Important Role

VICTOR HUGO'S JESTER

Paul Lent, who directed the Victor Hugo classic for Universal, tried innumerable actors for the part of the jester in the neio production, **The Man Who Laughs.” Many of them were hideous , grotesque, comic. Yet none of them suited the fastidious German wizard. Then he saw Brandon Hurst.

I-lere was a real actor, a man witli 20 years’ experience on the legitimate stage and an enviable screen career. His work as Jehan in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” proved him a genius for grotesque pantomime. So Leni sent for Hurst.

“You know,” he subsequently related, “I did nothing but make faces into the camera. Leni kept shouting in his broken English, ‘More uglier, more uglier!’ I had already, with the help of the make-up man and a few ideas of my own about the part, achieved a face that was far from handsome. But Leni waved his megaphone at me and kept repeating his cry of more uglier.”

“You know the result,” he added. “I became Barkilphedro. Leni assured me that I was a thousand times ‘more uglier’ than all the other tryouts put together!” Barkilphedro, you know, is the ruthless jester who, out of sheer spite at an idle remark of the Duchess Josiana, decided to strip the lovely lady of her power at court. Hurst has done full credit to the possibilities of the role. His forehead is wrinkled in a dozen deep trenches, his mouth is malicious, his eyes are mere sinister slits, and every line in his lean body registers sardonic slyness. “Barkilphedro is such a shameless sinner and gloats so over his meanness. One of my gravest faults, so my friends say, is an overenthusiasm about my work. I can’t help being keen about it, though.” CHARMS OF LAURA

He reverted to the business of motion pictures and the charms of Laura La Plante. Mr. Hurst’s enthusiasm bubbled over again. “Miss La Plante is one of the cleverest young women on the screen today,” he announced. “I’m a free lance actor and I have played in many pictures and on many lots. Seldom have I seen such amusing patomime continued for so long a sequence as Laura La Plante’s work in ‘Silk Stockings.’ That girl is wonderful!” “You, know.” he added, whimsically,

“I have always wanted to be a comedian myself. Perhaps that is one reason why I adm i r e Miss La Plante’s work so much. But no one will cast me in comedy roles.” He finally admitted that the secret of good acting was not making faces but a certain re-

pose gained only through years of experience. Not all the bedlam of the moving picture lot, the swarm of extras, the babble of spectators, can shake Mr. Hurst’s ease.

Pie forgets everything but the part. ITe is not Brandon Hurst, suave, cultivated Englisraan; he is Barkilphedro, sly and sinister. Olga Baclanova is no longer a Russian actress with a fascinating accent and a swift, interesting mind; she is fTosiana, cruel and alluring.

She is the canker in the heart of a jester. She is the maddening, tod lovely, thing that must be crushed.