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Laura La Plante ALS SIGNED LETTER Hollywood Star

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The following item is from a private collection of autographed photographs and letters from early Hollywood stars, including famous actors and actresses in silent films and early talkies (1920s-1930s). This is a hand-signed item, not a reprint, autoprint, or rubber stamp. These wonderful items, which are all being sold during this auction, were obtained through the mail around 1925 by a devoted film fan in Coronation, Alberta, who appeared to have taken on a bet from a cynical friend who thought that nobody could expect personal responses to correspondence from these famous individuals. These items show nicely with some mild to moderate age/wear.Celebrity name: Laura La Plante
Signed Item: Three-page handwritten signed letter on personal stationery
Date: 1926

Biography: La Plante made her acting debut at the age of 15, and in 1923 was named as one of the years WAMPAS Baby Stars. During the 1920s she appeared in more than sixty films. Among her early film appearances were Big Town Round-Up (1921), with cowboy star Tom Mix, and the serials Perils of the Yukon (1922) and Around the World in Eighteen Days (1923). The majority of her films (i.e. from 1921 to 1930) were made for Universal Pictures. During this period she was the studio's most popular star, "an accomplishment duplicated only by Deanna Durbin years later." [1] Her best remembered film is arguably the silent classic The Cat and the Canary (1927), although she also achieved acclaim for Skinner's Dress Suit (1926), with Reginald Denny, the part-talkie The Love Trap (1929), directed by William Wyler, and the 1929 part-talkie film version of Show Boat (1929), adapted from the novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. Although this last film was an adaptation of the novel, and not of the famous musical play that the novel was based on, some songs from the play were tossed into the film as box-office insurance. La Plante, however, did not actually sing in the movie; her singing was dubbed by Eva Olivetti, one of the first instances in which this was done in a motion picture. Quite unusual for its day, a scene of La Plante in Show Boat was broadcast on early British television. The advent of 'talkies' effectively shortened her career. Only in her mid-twenties, La Plante proved to be a quite natural and appealing presence in early talkies but the huge wave of new stars in those years overshadowed her. She made her last appearances for Universal in the Technicolor musical extravaganza King of Jazz (1930). For a while she free-lanced, appearing in God's Gift to Women (Warner Bros., 1931), directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starring Frank Fay, and Arizona (Columbia,1931), co-starring a young John Wayne. Shipping cost (within the U.S.) for this lot will be: $4.50

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