DRESSLER, MARIE

(1868-1934)

   Born Lelia Maria Koerber in Cobourg, Canada, the daughter of a hot-tempered Prussian cavalry officer and a long-suffering musician began performing in amateur theatricals as a child and soon realized her ability to make audiences laugh. At 14 she left home and changed her name to make her professional debut with a cheap traveling stock company in the dramatic role of Cigarette in Under Two Flags. After three years with the Nevada Stock Company, she toured briefly in the Robert Grau Opera Company chorus, then held chorus parts with Frank Deshon's Starr Opera Company and then George A. Baker's Bennett and Moulton Opera Company, followed by a Chicago engagement with Eddie Foy in Little Robinson Crusoe.

   After her 1892 New York debut in a musical play, Dressler faced the fact that she was destined not to be a diva but a comedy performer. Despite her full-figured 200 pounds, she had stamina and athletic grace. She often bicycled with Lillian Russell and relished the epithet "Beauty and the Beastie" describing them. Dressler's ability to improvise comic business and to captivate audiences with her double takes and other facial expressions blossomed in the role of Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey (1896), which ran two years in New York and then toured, taking her to stardom. After a long string of Broadway and London successes, she began a motion picture career in 1914 with Tillie's Punctured Nightmare, featuring the Tillie Blobs character she had created on Broadway in 1910. In 1931, she won the Academy Award for her performance in Min and Bill. She wrote two memoirs, The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling (1924) and My Own Story (1934).