Marie Eline

Biography

A snow-covered February in 1902 Milwaukee delivered Marie Eline to the world; eight winters later she stepped before Thanhouser’s New York cameras and stole A 29-Cent Robbery (released 1910) so completely that the studio crowned its seven-year-old scene-stealer “The Thanhouser Kid.” From the start she shape-shifted—skirts, knickers, pigtails, blackface—slipping into whatever skin the story demanded, including the judge’s African-American page boy in 1911. Trade reviewers, starved for authenticity, hailed her unforced acting; ticket buyers, starved for charm, turned her one-reelers into gold. At eleven she stormed Broadway, then watched Thanhouser promote her to its velvet-roped Princess Films branch. The limelight dimmed almost overnight. 1914 found her walking away from the lot that once boasted her name, trading celluloid for greasepaint in an Uncle Tom’s Cabin filmed by World, then criss-crossing the provinces in stock and vaudeville turns beside sister Grace. A 1919 stopover at Los Angeles’ penny-pinching National Film Corp. proved brief; the footlights kept calling until a 1922 wedding shifted the spotlight to home life and one daughter. She was visiting that grown daughter in Longview, Washington, when she closed her final act on 3 January 1981.