![]() ![]() She reinvented herself as Nita Naldi, taking her new surname from roommate Maria Naldi, whom she passed off as her sister. In 1918–19, she was in The Ziegfeld Follies. We do know she was on Broadway by 1918, performing by the Winter Garden. Mary began acting around 1915, though dates and details are currently obscured in a fog of mystery. Many of its alumni went on to careers in the nascent film industry and theatre. This Catholic girls’ school provided a full, equal education, going above and beyond what many other schools offered girls in this era. Mary took a ferry every Monday and boarded at the school till Friday, when she travelled back to New York. The upwardly mobile Dooleys, wanting their daughter to get ahead in life, sent her to Holy Angels Academy across the river in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Her next-youngest brother, Daniel, was the only other Dooley sibling to live past infancy. She was the third of Patrick and Julia Dooley’s six children, and the first who survived infancy. Nita Naldi (née Mary Nonna Dooley) (13 November 1893–17 February 1961), one of the great silent Vamps, was born in a Harlem tenement. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.This is edited and greatly expanded from an entry in my “Too Young, Too Soon” series on my old Angelfire site, written in 2005. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. (is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). There’s an entire website devoted to her! Check out .įor more on vaudeville, where Nita Naldi got her start, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous , available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. She appeared in an off-Broadway revue with Mae Murray in 1942, had a role in the 1952 Broadway show In Any Language, and coached Carol Channing for The Vamp (1955). ![]() At this stage, it was widely held that she was no longer a beauty she had gained weight since her film stardom. The pair separated, she came home, filed for bankruptcy and starred in two short-lived Broadway shows Firebird (1932) and Queer People (1934). Starting in the late 20s she spent several years in Europe and married her longtime lover the millionaire J. It was during this heyday that she she sat for this famous illustration by Alberto Vargas: She was a frequent co-star of Rudolph Valentino and his wife Natacha Rambova. She was to become of Hollywood’s top silent era vamps, starring in such notable films as Blood and Sand (1922), The Ten Commandments (1923), Cobra (1924), and Alfred Hitchcock’s second film The Mountain Eagle (1926). This in turn lead to acting roles in plays, the biggest of which was aptly named Opportunity (1920).įrom here she went into films, essentially starting out at the top, opposite John Barrymore in Dr. This led to chorus parts in Follow the Girl (1918), The Passing Show of 1918and the Ziegfeld Follies of 19. She worked as an artists’ model and then broke into vaudeville in a two-act with her brother Frank. Fortunately her extraordinary beauty made it easier than it might have been. When her (then single) mother died in 1915, she was forced to care for her two younger siblings. Naldi was the child of working class Irish parents in New York City. Today is the birthday of Nita Naldi (Mary Dooley, 1894-1961). ![]()
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