‘Laura La Plante: Silent Cinderella’
By Laura Jerrolds
Introduction by Kevin Brownlow
BearManor Media, 286 pages

When a film historian, Kevin Brownlow, showed up at the home of producer Irving Asher to shoot a documentary about his career, Brownlow hoped he would also get to interview Asher’s wife, the elusive Laura La Plante (1904-96), famous for her wonderful performances in light comedies but best remembered for her dramatic role in “The Cat and the Canary.”

A first-time biographer, Laura Jerrolds is already savvy, beginning her biography with this celebrated film historian’s story, which also serves as a teaser: Why was La Plante reluctant to be interviewed? She was a star of great magnitude in silent Hollywood who also had a creditable career in sound, and did television work as well.

No biography of La Plante existed, so Ms. Jerrolds set out to explore how her subject won acclaim, then retired to a happy home and family without, apparently, the slightest qualm about relinquishing stardom.

As Ms. Jerrolds discovered, La Plante did not grow up wanting to be a movie star. She began as an extra in 1923 to contribute to her family’s income. She graduated to bit parts that led to feature roles and ultimately stardom. At each stage of her career, La Plante seemed to take in stride the opportunities presented to her, and sometimes seized the day by refusing roles in movie serials that she feared would relegate her to playing the same characters again and again.

If the scandal-free La Plante lacks the intensity that invigorates biographies of Hollywood stars, she is a fascinating study of discipline and resistance to taking herself or Hollywood too seriously. 

When La Plante’s first marriage atrophied, with both partners agreeing they no longer seemed to have an interest in one another, they parted amicably, and La Plante had no trouble transitioning to marrying Asher, who had more than a decade earlier desired La Plante at a time when she was not available. The story of their enduring marriage and their collaboration on British films is one of the most satisfying parts of this biography.

So what was it about Laura La Plante that made her a star? She was beautiful to be sure, wearing bobbed blonde hair as a recognizable feature throughout her career.  She was, on screen and off, a kind of Cinderella — silent not only in film work but in her quiet, persistent, unflappable demeanor that seemed to guarantee that a prince would come along to adore her, as Asher did, and as the unlikely hero does in “The Cat and the Canary.”

La Plante’s best-remembered film is still marvelous to watch. It is so atmospheric, set in a Gothic castle-mansion, with a cast of characters/suspects who all hope to inherit the fortune and the diamonds of the departed Cyril West.

La Plante, playing West’s distant cousin Annabelle, seems the least likely heir, but why that is so I won’t spoil by saying. Instead, watch La Plante’s entrance. At first she is seen from behind, and there is no good way to size her up, and then she turns in all her blonde, demure brilliance. Cinderella has indeed arrived.

La Plante had an openness to the camera that seems to have been acquired through much practice over several years, and yet also seems an evocation of her own transparency. She is the last person in the world, you would think, who could be accused of being crazy — though that is exactly what various characters, for their own nefarious purposes, try to show in “The Cat and the Canary.”

Like La Plante herself in Ms. Jerrolds’s narrative, Annabelle never becomes unhinged, and never treats anyone in the film — no matter how suspicious they are of her — with the slightest discourtesy or distrust. 

What Ms. Jerrolds presents in her solid, well-researched biography is a solid person who knew her value as a star and enjoyed her fame, and yet, when Kevin Brownlow came calling, never wished to inflate her status. The truth is that many of those silent film figures told Brownlow some whoppers that redounded to their own celebrity.  

That is why Ms. Jerrolds’s reality-check biography is so welcome.

Mr. Rollyson is author of biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, and Ronald Colman.