Charlotte Mineau

Biography

Charlotte Mineau—six-foot Parisian with a Sorbonne education—stepped off the Seine and straight into the whirlwind of American slapstick. Fatherless at eight weeks (a gendarme swept away by the river), she ricocheted through childhood, rattling typewriter keys in one city, folding silk in another, patching phone wires in a third until the smell of greasepaint lured her to a stage. Essanay snapped her up; Wallace Beery shared her first frame in The Usual Way (1913). When Chaplin crossed the Atlantic, she was already a studio veteran, slipping him an almost-invisible cameo in His New Job (1915) and following the Tramp to Mutual. Sennett and Roach claimed her next, parking her beside Laurel & Hardy—see her cool elegance amid the custard-pie chaos of Sugar Daddies (1927). Silent comedy prized pratfalls over pulchritude, so producers folded their tallest card into haughty dowagers and scheming vamps; Mineau simply lowered her voice, narrowed her gaze, and cashed $350 every Friday. Talkies arrived, the parts evaporated, and her final close-up dissolved into the party chatter of Monkey Business (1931) as “Emily,” a fleeting nod from the Marxes before she exited the frame for good.