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Book now available: Comedy star Marie Dressler's autobiography

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Now available — "Marie Dressler — The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling: A reissue of the comedian's 1924 autobiography" — order your paperback copy at Amazon

Written at a turning point in her career, Marie Dressler’s autobiography offers an inside look at a woman navigating life and work that resonates today. Her life is one of constant evolution, reinvention, acceptance, hard work – and, of course, laughs.

Dressler today is remembered as a pioneering actress, singer and comedian who used improvisation and physicality to make her audiences laugh. But in 1924’s “The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling,” Dressler is at a crossroads. Behind her was enormous success on Broadway and in a handful of popular “moving pictures.” Ahead of her was a so-called “comeback” to critical and box office acclaim. The memoir showcases her good nature and pragmatic outlook that helped her navigate these career ebbs and flows.

Leaving home at 14 to join a theater circuit in the 1890s, Canadian-born Dressler learned the ins and outs of entertainment during every phase of the industry’s critical junctures: from its vaudeville beginnings to its Broadway heights to its transition to the silver screen during Hollywood’s golden era.

After several years of success on Broadway, she shot to stage superstardom in 1910 as the title character in “Tillie’s Nightmare,” the story of a wealthy but oafish country girl’s love of a con man. The New York Times praised her performance at the time, describing Dressler as raising “a ruction as only a very large and very noisy and very clever person can raise without being arrested.” The role led to Hollywood, where Dressler made a screen version of Tillie in 1914’s “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” considered the first feature-length comedy movie. While Dressler got top billing, the Mack Sennett-produced movie also starred then up-and-coming silent comedians Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand.

A handful of movies and a few flops on stage followed. She hit the circuit to campaign for bonds to support the U.S. effort in World War I, and she helped organize a union for stage chorus players. Her companion (reports differ on the status of their marriage) Jim Dalton died in 1921. Stage and screen offers dried up. She was broke. By 1924, now in her 50s, she was at a professional and personal low. But as she wrote at the time in “The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling,” “I have no sense of having ended my career, but rather of having begun it.”

Dressler turned out to be prophetic. In 1927, as “talkies” were revolutionizing the movie industry, Dressler’s career enjoyed a renaissance. She took a dramatic turn in the acclaimed “Anna Christie” (1930) with Greta Garbo and in the same year co-starred with Wallace Beery in the dramedy “Min and Bill” (1931), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Another Oscar nod (1932’s “Emma”) and more box office hits followed, including her now-classic role in “Dinner at Eight” (1933). Despite the glamorous starlets in MGM’s heavenly rosters, she was among the studio’s top consistent money-makers and beloved by audiences. She would die at age 62 in 1934 at the height of her resurgent fame.

In “The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling,” 10 years before her death, she describes her run-ins with everyone from Rockefellers and presidents to taxi drivers and chorus girls; the backstage politics and glass ceilings as a woman performer; the love of travel and the heartache of home life – themes and life lessons that resonate in a modern 21st world, all in Dressler’s practical, fun-filled voice. “I have played my life as comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it,” she wrote.

Today, her life and career are celebrated around the world. But perhaps no place celebrates her legacy like Dressler’s birthplace of Cobourg, Ontario, in Canada. Home to a Marie Dressler museum, the town also hosts the Marie Dressler Foundation Vintage Film Festival. The first festival launched in 1993 with a showing of “Tillie's Punctured Romance” and has since grown to screen dozens of cinematic gems every year, keeping Dressler and classic movies alive for new generations of audiences. The 2024 festival runs October 18-20.

Order your copy of "Marie Dressler — The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling: A reissue of the comedian's 1924 autobiography," available as a paperback on Amazon

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A few thoughts on movies, money and more

from Marie Dressler in “The Story of an Ugly Duckling”:

On women’s looks: The upkeep on my face has never been heavy and I have had no heart-aches at seeing vanish something I never possessed.

On money: I never weep over lost money, for I figure I’d rather go to the poorhouse once than go there every day.

On love: That has been a chronic disease with me. I’m never out of love, never expect to be, and never want to be.

On taking chances: Everybody told me that when I once went into vaudeville I would never play Broadway again, which seemed to be ridiculous, since the stage doors of the legitimate and vaudeville houses look alike and the audiences don’t look much different. 

On making movies: I became camera wise immediately. The thing was as alive to me as an audience and I loved it.

On the future of movies: I believe the picture game is bound to live, despite censors composed of grafters and thin-lipped women who never slipped because they never had the chance.

On her most famous Broadway role: The public thinks it remembers “Tillie Blobbs,” the boarding house drudge, because she was so funny. But I know better—it was the sincerity of her—the tears that glistened back of every laugh that makes her live. That is real comedy.

On society: I am entertained, too, by the so-called society people who boast of their friends higher up or who are not quite sure whether it is all right to be seen with me because I’m an actress.

On confidence: Fear is the devil’s greatest weapon—and he uses it all the time.

On success: When subpoenas began coming my way, I knew I had arrived.

On comedy: The biggest hits on the stage are often accidents and what you don’t expect is always sure to come true.

On aging: The slogan used to be, “Sow your wild oats when you are young.” I had no time then, but when I get to be seventy just look out for me!