Alma Rubens entered films as a teenager. Her beauty and dynamic acting gained her featured roles with Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart. Her ability to express emotion movingly brought audience and critical attention and support. Her life and career were overwhelmed in the late twenties by narcotics addiction. Hospitalization and treatment seemed to bring about a cure, and she attempted to restart her career by appearing in vaudeville. She was struggling with a relapse of her addiction at the time she developed pneumonia and died.
Early Career
Rubens started her career as a teenager by replacing a chorus girl in a minor stage production. Her first film roles were uncredited extra work in shorts produced by Kay-Bee Pictures and Vitagraph Films in 1913-15. She also had uncredited bit parts in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).
In 1916, Rubens, not yet twenty, joined the newly formed Fine Arts Company and appeared in four films with Douglas Fairbanks, playing supporting parts in Reggie Mixes In and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, and his leading lady in The Half-Breed and The Americano. In 1917, at the Ince Company, she had featured roles with William S. Hart in Truthful Tulliver and The Cold Deck.
Career Apex
From 1920-23, now with William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions, Rubens starred in a succession of well-received films, including The World and His Wife, Humoresque, The Valley of Silent Men, Enemies of Women, and Under the Red Robe.
Reviewers around the country admired Rubens' youthful beauty and praised her
expressive acting. The extremely popular Humoresque, directed by
Frank Borzage, was the first hit of Rubens' career. The anonymous critic in
The New York Times wrote that her work in
The World and His Wife proves her quality.
Variety,
reviewing Enemies of Women, noted the strength and authority of
Lionel Barrymore's acting but gave
the palm of the picture
to Rubens, adding that, in her scenes with
Barrymore,
[Rubens] achieves some of the most eloquent pantomime of screen history.
She took hold of the audience
with acting that reached
genuine emotional expression.
Humoresque and
Enemies of Women, the most successful films of Rubens' career, played
around the country for months.
In 1924-25, Rubens continued to make well-received films, including Cytherea, The Price She Paid, The Dancers, co-starring Madge Bellamy, East Lynne, and The Winding Stair.
Reviewers continued to praise Rubens' lovely features and emotionally forceful
acting. 'Sallie', film fashion columnist in Variety, commenting about
Cytherea, noted that Rubens
never acted or dressed to better advantage.
Variety critic 'Fred'
predicted that The Dancers would be
sure fire at the box office
and praised her performance as
there 100 percent,
while Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times wrote
by far the best performance is that of Alma Rubens
who
makes a bewitching Argentinean dancer.
Career Decline
Rubens' career — and life — disintegrated during the late 1920s. After appearing in six films in 1925, and despite retaining her popularity and box office appeal, she made only five films from 1926-28, and after two small supporting roles in 1929, her career was over.
Rubens made three emotionally charged films in 1926:
Gilded Butterfly, Siberia, and
Marriage License. Critics continued to praise her.
Variety described her role in Marriage License as
an exceptional opportunity for enacting emotionally charged scenes in a
dignified, high-class production.
She appeared in only one film in 1927, The Heart of Salome.
The Masks of the Devil, co-starring
John Gilbert and directed by Victor
Sjöström, was her only apperance in 1928. Despite featured billing, her
role is of little importance.
Alma Rubens' film career ended with supporting roles in two 1929 part-talkies, She Goes to War, starring Eleanor Boardman, and Show Boat.
Comments in the pages of Variety called attention to Rubens' altered
appearance. A column headlined
So Pitifully Thin, Alma Looked [the] Role
stated that she had
acquired a sylph-like form
and resembles a famished exile
, as
required for her role in Siberia. The reviewer for
The Heart of Salome complained that she
looks like a type of French girl, but not the kind men are interested in. The
first essential, s.a. [sex appeal], is sadly lacking in her makeup.
A fashion column Among the Women
written by The Skirt
praised the
striking black evening gown and wrap
Rubens wears in
The Masks of the Devil but noted that her makeup
appeared faulty.
Despite her diminished health and wan physical appearance, Rubens had not lost her emotive ability. She has touching emotional scenes with a dying soldier in She Goes to War and with a child in Show Boat.
Personal Life
Alma Rubens was born in San Francisco and educated at the prestigious parochial school Sacred Heart Convent. She was attracted to acting from an early age, appearing in her first film at age 17. At age 19 she joined the newly formed Fine Arts Company. Her first major role was in the Douglas Fairbanks film The Half-Breed (1916). Her first marriage, to Franklin Farnum, a minor actor twenty years her senior, lasted only a few months, from June to September, 1918.
In January, 1925, after two years of marriage to Daniel Carson Goodman, head of Cosmopolitan Productions, she filed for divorce alleging cruelty and accusing him of beating her frequently during the five months they lived together. The item in The New York Times reporting the filing noted that she had also accused Farnum of beating her.
Rubens married actor Ricardo Cortez in January, 1926. Before the marriage, she told reporters that she planned to retire, and although she did not, she made far fewer films after her marriage to Cortez. In 1928, the couple spent several months in Europe. Upon their return, they separated, but did not divorce. She said that Cortez did not know about her drug addiction at the time of their marriage.
In an interview in 1930, Rubens described the beginning of her narcotic addiction:
I was in considerable pain from a minor ailment and I took a hypodermic to relieve the agony. The ailment continued and off and on for four years I took small doses of narcotics. Then suddenly I was caught and for two years I had to have drugs. Toward the end it became terrible. I placed 'dope' on a pedestal as a little god. I thought I had to have it. Nothing else mattered much.
In 1929, her narcotic addiction derailed her screen career and life. The New York Times printed a series of items about her troubles. In early January, 1929, several Hollywood neighbors filed a complaint charging her with disturbing the peace. According to the complaint, she prowled around at all hours with a flashlight, looking for some unnamed thing that she never found. Her boisterous parties disturbed them, too. In late January, she was sent to a sanitarium; traveling by ambulance, she stabbed the attending doctor and escaped twice. In February, she left the sanitarium for a day or two, but soon returned, reportedly due to nervous collapse and excessive use of narcotics. At home again, Cortez and her mother signed a warrant to have her sent to a state institution for treatment of her narcotic addiction. She left behind a tangle of law suits and investigations, including the charges for disturbing the peace, charges of assault and battery against her maid, for an alleged attack on a driver following auto collision involving Rubens' car, and a federal investigation of several doctors suspected of illegally providing her (and other film personalities) with narcotics. In early May, she was released from the state institution. In mid-May, her mother called the sheriff and signed a complaint to have her recommitted to the state hospital after she attacked her nurse and threatened suicide. Late in December, the doctors at the state hospital declared Rubens cured and released her from the state system. Despite all this turmoil, she managed to struggle through emotional scenes in Show Boat and She Goes to War.
After her recovery, Rubens and Cortez went separately to New York to appear in vaudeville sketches at RKO theaters. For much of 1930, Rubens attempted to revive her career by appearing in vaudeville; despite her peppy and vivacious performance and initial audience interest in her show, overall public response was tepid. After a short-lived association with a Broadway-bound play, she returned to Los Angeles.
In early January, 1931, Rubens was arrested in San Diego on a charge of narcotics smuggling. Released on bail, she went to live with her mother. In mid-January, Rubens came down with pneumonia. Her decline was rapid, and on January 21, 1931, Alma Rubens died at the home of her physician with her mother and sister by her side.
Career Consideration
Alma Rubens' obituary in The Los Angeles Times named her the
queen of emotional actresses.
From her first featured role with Douglas
Fairbanks in The Half Breed in 1916 to her final small role in
Show Boat, Rubens specialized in portraying women under great
emotional stress. The public and the critics were moved by the power of her
acting. Although never in the top rank of film actresses, she received
considerable recognition and esteem during her twelve year career.
Further Reading