Accusations of overacting bedeviled blond Helen Twelvetrees even when she was Pathé's top female star in the early days of sound, as did the inevitable joke that she was "Rin Tin Tin's favorite actress." Few of her films are viewed today and she is perhaps best remembered for playing the tough woman torn between William Boyd and a very young (and villainous) Clark Gable in The Painted Desert (1931), a Western that is hardly typical of her work. A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Art (where she met her first husband, alcoholic actor Clark Twelvetrees), Helen Twelvetrees did a stint with the Stuart Walker Stock Company and played in the Chicago company of An American Tragedy before signing with Hollywood studio Fox. But a slight lisp was exaggerated in the gossip magazines and the studio dumped her after only three films. Luckily, a group of motion picture advertisers had voted her a 1929 WAMPAS Baby Star and she quickly signed a contract with Pathé/RKO.
Twelvetrees made an early impact in Her Man (1930), a laundered screen version of the "naughty" stage play Frankie and Johnny, and although there were some whispers of exaggeration, a few critics compared her favorably to Lillian Gish. But …  » Read more