I try not to link to youtube clips, as, well, it’s annoying. But I’d mentioned Lyda Roberti in another thread and it occured to me that it is barely possible that one or two people in the world might not be familiar with her, as bizarre as that seems.
Brilliant Polish-born musical-comedy actress of the 1930s: raised by a circus family, hit vaudeville and B’way in the late 1920s (possibly introduced the song “Minnie the Moocher,” I haven’t confirmed that). Made a handful of films before dying of heart disease in 1938, at around 29 years old.
Here is a clip of her from the brilliant screwball comedy Million Dollar Legs, doing a parody of Greta Garbo’s Mata Hari. Terrible video quality, but you can see why she is my heroine.
Enjoy! And I promise not to overdo the youtube linking . . .
Hehe…love her using Randy “Macho Man” Savage’s entrance music, but I suspect I’m the only one that made that odd connection. I like the actress, but she’s a little skinny for my taste…
Actually no, I can’t. Nice work, but care to elaborate? She’s no Vivien Leigh IMHO if that’s what you are getting at. My secretary that does the mail is more of a looker than she. Roberti does seem to have the right attitude, for the part, but her dress knocked my socks off more than anything else.
Damn right she’s no Vivien Leigh, she’s funny! She’s certainly not drop-dead gorgeous, but she has that great Bette Midlery mile-wide grin, evil eyes, terrific comic timing and a red-hot singing voice. Not that many women can be sexy and funny–Lyda was like a love child of Jean Harlow and Fanny Brice.
(Did you say her dress knocked your socks off, or your socks knocked her dress off?)
Maybe the thread title should have been: Lyda Roberti, The Woman No Man Can Resist (Depending Very Much on Your Definitions of “Woman” and “Man”).
Me, I usually agree on everything Eve and Chuck like, but I find Miss Roberti very resistible indeed. She had a figure like an 11-year-old and a voice like an explosion in a pickle factory.
An aside from the OP, some of us must have recognized Billy Gilbert among the men.
In the Our Gang short “Forgotten Babies,” Spanky gets stuck babysitting a mob of toddlers, one of whom keeps saying “Remarkable!” (undeterred when Spanky yells “shut up!” - perhaps ad-libbed). One of the toddlers takes the candlestick-phone off the hook, and the operator hears Billy Gilbert on the radio performing a play where he’s killing his girlfriend. The operator sends the police, who arrive to find that Spanky has the put the toddlers in cages or glued their butts to the floor.
Hypotheses:
• Maybe because Cab Calloway didn’t have a band to sing it with yet?
• Maybe because Cab’s manager had a case on Lyda and wanted to, um, give it to her?
• Maybe because we’re dealing here with a period in history that’s essentially been submerged by popular culture, and that anybody at all knowledgeable about it is likely to be more than a little obsessive and possessed of a steel-trap memory that occasionally coughs up tidbits that are all but unconfirmable by the intelligent layperson?
The guy playing the Secretary of the Navy was a short man which seemed like a gag referring to something or someone. Why would the head of the Navy being so short be funny?
I wrote a magazine article about her years ago and it was in several of her obits–so in the article I noted that it was highly unverified (she played in vaudeville and revues in the late '20s and early '30s). I actually doubt she introduced it (or its previous version, “Willie the Weeper”), but she would have been terrific singing it.
More on Lyda: Patsy Kelly and Thelma Todd did a series of comedy shorts; after Thelma Todd died in 1935, Lyda took over her part. After Lyda died in 1938, no one would go near Patsy Kelly . . .
