Madge Evans

Biography

Before she could read, Madge Evans could already sell soap. At two, she balanced on a cake of Fairy Soap, violet bouquet in fist, while cameras cooed, “Have you a little fairy in your home?” The public bit; “Baby Madge” became the face that sold both suds and straw bonnets. By five she had traded bubbles for biblical spectacle, snagging a walk-on in William Farnum’s 1914 epic *The Sign of the Cross*. A year later she was one of Marguerite Clark’s *Seven Sisters*. Before she turned eight she had sprinted through twenty shorts and features in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, sharing chalk-marked sets with Pauline Frederick and Alice Brady while the Hudson stood in for the Tiber. In 1917 Broadway beckoned: John and Lionel Barrymore towered over her in *Peter Ibbetson*, but the kid held her own. She took eight years off to grow up, then vaulted back in 1926 as a lanky ingenue in *Daisy Mayme*, followed by Noël Coward’s lace-and-daggers comedy *The Marquise* opposite Billie Burke. Louis B. Mayer’s scouts liked the mix of dimples and discipline; in 1931 MGM shipped her west. Over the next six seasons she slipped into celluloid dinner jackets and Depression-era calico with equal ease: Lionel Barrymore’s resigned daughter in *Dinner at Eight* (1933), the steadfast Agnes Wickfield in George Cukor’s luminous *David Copperfield* (1935), the school-teacher trying to civilize James Cagney in *The Mayor of Hell* (1933). Spencer Tracy barked at her in *The Show-Off* (1934) and Bing Crosby sang redemption at her in *Pennies from Heaven* (1936). Critics singled her out in *Beauty for Sale* (1933) and *Fugitive Lovers* (1934); the *Times* called her “spontaneous and captivating.” Yet the studio preferred her goodness laminated, not tested. Give her the “other woman” part—*What Every Woman Knows* (1934) opposite Helen Hayes—and audiences squirmed, unable to buy sin under that Sunday-school smile. When the contract lapsed in 1937 she simply folded her gloves, married Pulitzer-winning playwright Sidney Kingsley in 1939, and let the cameras click shut. A final stage curtain rose in 1943 when she stepped into his historical drama *The Patriots*, then exited, quietly, into private life.