A rather coarse-looking brunette, Mae Hotely became one of America's earliest screen comediennes, excelling in playing rural types and/or harridans. Had she not been under contract to the rather pedestrian Lubin Mfg. Company (and "manufacturing" was indeed the correct term), she may have gone much further than she did. But saddled with less than ideal budgets, Hotely proved yet another early screen performer left behind at the changeover to feature films in the 1910s. Directed by her husband Arthur Hotaling, Hotely first appeared in the split-reel "Gay Time Comedies," which the Hotalings filmed everywhere they went before finally settling in Jacksonville, FL, in 1914. Among the members of the Jacksonville Lubin stock company there was a very young Oliver Hardy who made his screen debut in the comedies of Hotely and Billy Bowers.The Jacksonville unit was disbanded in 1915 when the Hotalings were reassigned to produce a series of comedies starring British music hall veteran Billie Reeves. Filmed in Atlantic City, NJ, the Reeves films featured Hotely as the leading lady but were not very successful and the couple left Lubin in favor of Essanay. While Hotaling continued to act, write, direct, and produce the odd low-budget film through the 1920s, Hotely seems to have retired except for a brief role as Priscilla Bonner's aunt in the 1929 Tiffany release Girls Who Dare. She was widowed in 1938.
by Hans J. Wollstein
biography
