Mrs. Sidney Drew

Biography

A twenty-year-old Vitagraph scenarist named Lucille McVey stepped onto a Brooklyn set in 1914 and found herself opposite Sidney Drew, the elegant comedian still dazed by the recent loss of his wife. Within weeks the gap between his 46 years and her 21 collapsed into a hasty honeymoon. Renamed “Mrs. Sidney Drew” by posters and publicists alike, she traded her typewriter for the couple’s shared imagination, churning out sly, tea-cozy comedies—The Stumbling-block, A Safe Investment, Boobley’s Bubble—that poked gentle fun at marriage without the custard-pie hysteria then in vogue. While he guided the camera, she slipped barbed witticisms between the pleasantries; together they polished a brand of humor that felt like a neighbor’s gossip delivered over lemonade. The partnership lasted barely six years: Sidney died in 1919, and Lucille, suddenly the custodian of a name she had only borrowed, shuttered her scripts and drifted from the flicker-light world she had helped brighten. A slow, wasting sickness claimed her in 1925; she was 35.