Picture Postcards.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVI, Issue 43067, 12 March 1907, Page 2

Picture Postcards.

ACTRESSES AND THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS. Miss Gertie Millar, a well-known actress, recently bi ought a fruitless action against Messrs Dunn and Co., in regard to certain i * faked ” picture postcard photographs It is said that many of the pictures sold are made by joining the photograph af the head of an actress onto the picture of someone else’s body .often in very peculiar positions, and this has caused annoyance to several prominent Miss Edna May, in explaining what had first caused herself to take action against the postcard publishers says it was that “ When I got b -.ck to England last summer I was thunderstruck at the perfectly awful picture postcards sup • posed to represent myself which stared at me from the shop windows. Like Miss Millar, I was depicted as crawling out of egg-shells and posing as a nymph. But what disgusted me. most was a postcard representing me as a dreadful young person sitting on a rock by the sea shore pulling on my stockings! "Worse still, people use 1 to send these dreadful things to me and ask me to sign them ” I do not think,” said Miss Doris Beresford, of the Gaiety Theatre, ‘ 1 that the publio quite realise the nuisance it is to actresses to suffer as Miss Gertie Millar has suffered from seeiug photographs of their owu heads stuck on other people s bodies. The positions that we are put in are sometimes vulgar, generally ugly, tuid not rarely very silly, and in consequence one receives numbers of letters from friends and relations protesting against our having been taken in various poses which we would never dream of adopting. The craze for n utograph collecting brings shoals of photographs and picture postoards to an actress every week with a request to sign her name Not rarely at sucli a theatre as the Gaiety a little crowd of people stand at the stage door with photographs and fountain pens waiting for these autographs, and though one does not want to be disobliging, it is intensely irritating to sign one’s name to picture only part of whicb is oneself. Surely the law of libel or some other law ought to protect us. 1 * _ During the course of tho hearing it transpired that many of these actresses received as much as £3OO a year from certain photographers for the sole right to photograph them. The jury held that there could be no libel in this particular case. It was pointed out that if Miss Millar could have given evidence of one instance in which these photos had been to her disadvantage she would have succeeded in her action. However, as Mi- Powell elicited from her that such was not the case, but that, on the contrary, the ap« filause she nightly received was as unstint jd as ever, there ’was no evidence of def >m"tion to go to the jury. Although Miss Millar lost her < ase, the public might have a claim against the publishers of' the photos in question, on the ground of their selling to them what purported to be pictures of Miss Gertie Millar which were only in a partial sense representations of her.